DLR — Planetary Spectroscopy Laboratory

Snapshot

Why it matters internationally

PSL — formerly the Planetary Emissivity Laboratory — is one of the very few laboratories worldwide where emissivity is the laboratory’s central object rather than a supporting variable. Its three vacuum FTIR spectrometers measure emissivity, reflectance, and transmittance from 0.3 µm to beyond 100 µm, including the globally rare capability of measuring the emissivity of heated planetary-analog samples under vacuum, reproducing Mercury and Venus surface conditions at several hundred kelvin.

Scope of activity

Radiative properties measured

Spectral emissivity · reflectance · transmittance — visible to far infrared.

Capability envelope

• Spectral range: 0.3 µm to >100 µm (three vacuum FTIR spectrometers).
• Temperature: −200 °C to +1000 °C sample temperatures, including hot-emissivity measurements under vacuum; Europlanet transnational access facility.
• Specialty: planetary-analog materials — minerals, rocks, regolith simulants — measured under conditions matching planetary surfaces.

Data infrastructure

PSL maintains the Berlin Emissivity Database (BED), emissivity spectra of planetary-analog materials used for the interpretation and calibration of planetary infrared instruments.

Application domains

Planetary surface remote sensing — including MERTIS on BepiColombo (Mercury) and support for VERITAS (Venus) — plus laboratory characterization of analog materials for current and future missions.

Why PSL is a reference pole

For the emissivity community PSL demonstrates the planetary face of the same measurement problem the metrology institutes treat terrestrially: emission spectra only become interpretable when laboratory emissivity is measured under the right environmental conditions. Its hot-sample vacuum emissivity capability has no close equivalent in the directory.

External sources

• DLR — Planetary Spectroscopy Laboratory
• Berlin Emissivity Database (DLR)
• Facility to simulate Venus surface conditions (phys.org coverage)