Ball Aerospace has successfully completed stray light testing of the operational land imager (OLI) telescope assembly for Nasa’s Landsat data continuity mission.

The Landsat programme is a series of earth-observing satellite missions managed by Nasa and the US Geological Survey.

The OLI instrument will provide 15m panchromatic and 30m multispectral earth-imaging spatial-resolution capability for the eighth mission in the Landsat satellite series.

The instrument will image the earth every 16 days for applications including agricultural monitoring, natural resource management, land-use planning and climate science.

The test included point source rejection ratio scans demonstrating sensitivity over ten orders of magnitude that verified a good margin for the OLI telescope on all on-orbit stray light requirements.

The OLI is scheduled for launch in late 2012.