The design and in-orbit performance data are presented for the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment II (SAGE II) instrument which was launched by Shuttle on the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite. SAGE II is a Sun photometer that measures the extinction of Solar radiation caused by the Earth's atmosphere in seven spectral channels ranging in center wavelength from 0.385 to 1.02 micrometers. These measurements, which occur twice each orbit during satellite sunrise and sunset, are inverted to yield vertical distributions of stratospheric aerosols, ozone, water vapor, and nitrogen dioxide. The SAGE II instrument consists of a Cassegrain telescope with a two axis gimbal mounting, a grating spectrometer, and a 12 bit data system. The instrument tracks the Solar centroid in the aximuth plane and vertically scans the instrument's instantaneous field of view across the Sun for tangent altitudes ranging from the Earth's horizon to 150 km. SAGE II is a third generation instrument following the highly successful Stratospheric Aerosol Measurement II (SAM II) and SAGE I programs.
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