The radiant cooler is used to cool optics and detectors to reduce signal noise in infrared (IR) telescopes. In-orbit
radiant cooler could be contaminated by excessive molecular, particulate and outgassing. The contamination can
change the emittance, solar absorptance and scattering of the surface of optical reflector and earth shield. The paper
calculates the effection of contamination on the thermal properties of radiant cooler. The working performance
degrades a lot when the optical screens are contaminated. Anti-contamination is emphasized for the radiant cooler
through design, manufacture, tests and flight procedure for quantitative applications of remote sensing data. Low
outgassing materials, reasonable outgassing channels and outgassing heaters are applied to the radiant cooler to
reduce the potential contaminants. The flight performance of the cooler meets with the design requirements.
Infrared Atmospheric Sounder(IRAS) on FengYun-3 meteorological satellite measures scene radiance in the infrared
spectrum and is used for sounding atmospheric parameters such as temperature and vapor vertical profiles. MWIR and
LWIR detectors of IRAS need to work at 100K and are cooled by passive radiant cooler. To achieve temperature below
100K, multistage radiators are required. After the satellite was lunched in May 2008, the decontamination heaters of
IRAS cooler were turned on and the cooler was heated at about 300K. After anti-contamination cover was deployed, the
second stage radiator was heated for several days. When all heaters were turned off, the radiant cooler began to cool
down and reached its lowest temperature about 3 days. The uncontrolled temperature of second stage and first stage are
85.3K and 136.3K. The cooling capacity of IRAS cooler is approximately 70mw at 100K controlled temperature.
Degradation of IR channel signals is not observed. The flight performance and ground test results of the cooler are
presented.
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