Airborne infrared polarimeter

An infrared polarimeter was built to measure the degree of linear polarization and the direction of vibration of radiation scattered upwards by clouds, between 1.1 and 3.5 microns, with a 1.5-deg field of view, using a rotating wire-grid polarization analyzer. A PbS detector is cooled to 192 K by condensing freon-13. This AEROPOL instrument operates under minicomputer control, giving a polarization least-squares solution every 2.5 s. The polarimeter was flown on the NASA CV-990 aircraft, in a remote-sensing study of terrestrial cloud particle sizes and shapes.