Abstract
An earth laser beacon observed from space looks like a point similar to a bright star. Thus the spot image of a laser beacon is very useful for calibration/correction of the earth's surface image taken by optical radiometers or cameras, since it corresponds to an infinitively small landmark whose absolute location and brightness are known precisely. We conducted experiments of tracking the MOS-1 satellite and transmitting a laser beam from a ground station at CRL to the satellite. An argon ion laser was used as the beacon and the images taken by the MESSR were analyzed for this study.
As the results of our analyses, the tendency of the MOS-1 location error obtained from optical tracking is shown. Then the geometric error of the MESSR earth images and the satellite's attitude estimated from two dimensional coordinates of the laser spot and the scene center, are shown.
