VSWIR Spectrometer

The NERC Field Spectroscopy Facility (FSF) is an expanding world class facility supporting Earth System Science. It comprises a pool of high quality field spectroradiometers with associated calibration and support equipment.

The Problem
FSF wanted to design and build a new type of field spectrometer. This will have a combined measurement of environmental targets and sky conditions – something that current spectrometers are unable to do.

As they have no in-house optical design capability, so a complex system which captures light from both the target and sky simultaneously, and then divides the light between two spectrometer channels (visible/near-IR and short wave IR respectively) was a big challenge.

How ATC Innovations Helped

ATC Innovations were contracted to design and build a prototype fore-optics system for the spectrometer.

This kind of problem clearly demonstrates the strength of ATC’s system approach to engineering, from concept to hardware.  It started with concept design,We then progressed rapidly through detailed optical, mechanical and electrical designs,Using our in-house rapid prototyping machine we were able to make a representative mock-up of the hardware:

The End Result
With all this combined expertise in a single organisation, the result is a highly optimal system.