Calibration of the Shuttle borne solar backscatter ultraviolet spectrometer

The Shuttle Solar Backscatter UV (SSBUV) spectrometer that will be furnishing regular, on-orbit calibration checks of the ozone-monitoring instruments aboard NOAA satellites. The long-term ozone-monitoring program requires a reduction of uncharacterized drifts in the satellite instrument to a value lower than the expected ozone trend at the 95 percent confidence level; this translates into a requirement for the calibration of the SSBUV to a 1-sigma precision level of 1 percent from one flight to the next. A hierarchy of calibration standards is used to furnish redundancy and minimize biases; laboratory fixtures have been designed to minimize setup-induced systematic errors.