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EarthCARE (Earth Clouds, Aerosols and Radiation Explorer) is the 6th Earth Explorer mission of ESA‘s “Living Planet Earth“ Program. The EarthCARE satellite is about to start its environmental test campaign in autumn 2022. This Core Explorer mission (Core Explorer missions that focus on scientific objectives of a large scientific community) is a large and very complex Earth Explorer mission with 4 Instruments on board. It improves the representation and understanding of Earth's radiative balance for climate and numerical forecast models by advancing our understanding of the role that clouds and aerosols play in reflecting incident solar radiation back into space and trapping infrared radiation emitted from Earth's surface. To achieve this goal, EarthCare is hosting a Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI), an Atmospheric Lidar (ATLID) and a Broad-Band Radiometer (BBR) under European ESA authority and a Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR) under JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) authority. The EarthCare MSI Instrument consists in two camera units, the TIR (Thermal Infrared Radiometer) part with 3 channels (Band7 [8800nm], Band8 [10800nm] and Band9 [12000nm]) and an VNS (Visible, Near-infrared and Short-wave infrared) part with 4 channels (VIS [670nm], NIR [867nm], SWIR1 [1654nm] and SWIR2 [2214nm]) and by an overall weight of around 50kg (including control units, harness and thermal hardware). The Instrument performance qualification consist in a full performance verification testing on instrument level and of regular instrument performance checks (IPCs) on Satellite level after Instrument integration. This performance checks for the MSI concentrate on a simplified test approach and are regularly repeated along the entire S/C AIT campaign until launch. The test results will be compared with first reference IPC measurements from instrument Level. MSI IPC definition does focus on radiometric key performance parameters as noise and responsivity to identify optical or detection chain degradations, as well as detector dead pixels. This paper will present the MSI IPC approach for EarthCare and the first ambient results from S/C Level MSI IPCs performed so far. Furthermore this paper will show that the ambient S/C Level MSI IPC results are in line with the ambient IPC on instrument level but it will also shows good agreement with thermal vacuum results on Instrument level.
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