PEARLSS, A Sensor System Simulation of the Effects of Contaminants

Space-borne optical systems have become increasingly important in recent history. Contamination of such sensors in space is a critical issue because it degrades the capability to detect or identify objects of interest through stray light scatter into the field-of-view (FOV), signal attenuation, false targeting, defocussing of the target image, etc. The magnitude and structure of the noise contribution from contamination must be weighed against the magnitude and structure of other noise components in order to determine its importance. Clearly, the problem is system design dependent and a flexible means of simulation is required to address the issue. Many previous models have dealt only with pieces of the problem; PEARLSS (Particulate Effects Analysis on Response Levels of Space-borne Sensors) is a model which deals with contamination generation, migration, deposition, and resulting optical degradation in a single 'end-to-end' code.