We propose a Multispectral Earth Polarization Imager (MEPI), which is located at the Earth–Moon system’s Lagrange point L1. The imager can be used to measure the sunlight reflected by the Earth and the Moon. The measured sunlight has specific polarization information and spectral information, which can provide strong support for a comprehensive understanding of the Earth system and the construction of a perfect Earth–Moon system model. The MEPI provides multispectral images with wavelengths of 400–885 nm, and uses four sub-aperture systems to share a main system. The imager can capture the two-dimensional shape and polarization spectral information of the entire Earth at a spatial resolution of 10 km, and all spectral images can be simultaneously acquired on a single detector. The optical system of the instrument was designed and simulated. The simulation and analysis results showed that the camera can obtain high-quality images of the Earth disc with a 2.5° field of view (FOV). The novel MEPI provides a new way to generate climate-related knowledge from the perspective of global Earth observation. The imager can also be used for lunar observation to obtain spectral polarization information on the lunar surface. In addition, it also shows great potential in other applications of space remote sensing spectral imaging.
Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) provides a direct proxy for vegetation photosynthesis-related information; however, under stress conditions, its relationship with photosynthesis should be interpreted together with absorbed photosynthetically active radiation by chlorophyll (APARchl) and non-photochemical quenching (NPQ). This study presents a conceptual design of a compact dual-channel airborne imaging spectrometer for synchronous observation of SIF-related spectral radiance and broadband vegetation-canopy spectral reflectance (BR). A self-collimating shared-optical-path configuration is proposed to reduce the system volume, yielding a simulated optical envelope of 205 × 150 × 120 mm3. Optical simulations predict spectral resolutions better than 0.3 nm over 670–780 nm for the SIF channel and better than 2 nm over 400–780 nm for the BR channel. An asymmetric double Babinet depolarizer is incorporated to reduce polarization-related errors, and the simulated system polarization sensitivity is below 1%. The calculated stray-light ratios of the SIF and BR channels are 0.553% and 0.287%, respectively. LightTools was used to simulate the radiative transfer performance of the instrument under realistic scenes. Furthermore, an end-to-end SIF retrieval simulation was performed to evaluate the retrieval capability of the proposed system. The results indicate that the proposed concept is theoretically feasible and may support future quantitative SIF retrieval and the interpretation of vegetation photosynthetic and stress-related processes.