An Advanced Land Imager (ALl) will be flown on the first Earth Observing mission (EO-1) under NASA's New Millennium Program (NMP). The ALT contains a number of key NMP technologies. These include a 15° wide field-of-view, push-broom instrument architecture with a 12.5 cm aperture diameter, compact multispectral detector arrays, non-cryogenic HgCdTe for the short wave infrared bands, silicon carbide optics, and a multi-level solar calibration technique. The focal plane contains multispectral and panchromatic (MSIPan) detector arrays with a total of 10 spectral bands spanning the 0.4 to 2.5 jim wavelength region. Seven of these correspond to the heritage Landsat bands. The instantaneous fields of view of the detectors are 14.2 prad for the Pan band and 42.6 p.rad for the MS bands. The partially populated focal plane provides a 3° cross-track coverage corresponding to 37 km on the ground. The focal plane temperature is maintained at 220 K by means of a passive radiator. The instrument environmental and performance testing has been completed. Preliminary data analysis indicates excellent performance. This paper presents an overview of the instrument design, the calibration strategy, and results of the pre-flight performance measurements. It also discusses the potential impact of ALT technologies to future Landsat-like instruments.
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