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Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) is the new European mission for accurate observation of the Earth dedicated to meteorological applications. MTG Program is being realised through the well-established and successful cooperation between EUMETSAT and ESA. MTG system will ensure continuity and enhancement of operational meteorological (and climate) data from Geostationary Orbit as currently provided by the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) system. The industrial Prime Contractor for the Space segment of MTG is Thales Alenia Space (France) with a core team consortium including OHB (Germany). This contract includes the provision of six satellites, four Imaging satellites (MTG-I) and two sounding satellites (MTG-S), which will ensure a total operational life of the MTG system in excess of 20 years. MTG-I first satellite will be launched end of 2022, starting point of the in-orbit story of MTG. MTG-I embarks the FCI (Flexible Combined Imager), optical payload developed at Thales Alenia Space in France. The FCI is an imaging radiometer which provides simultaneously to the users 16 spectral channels from Visible to Very Long Wave InfraRed (0.4µm – 13.3µm) delivering full disk services (in 10 minutes) at their nominal sampling distance (1 to 2km). Four channels are also delivered at a smaller spatial sampling distance (down to 500m). FCI also provides local area scanning possibilities with a higher repeat cycle (down to 2.5 minutes). The present paper is dedicated to the FCI end-to-end radiometric performance. After an overview of the FCI and the design specificities of its detection chains, its key radiometric performance will be presented. It will focus on FCI PFM test results, which has successfully passed the on-ground fine radiometric calibration and characterization campaign under optical vacuum in 2021. After 10 years of development at Thales Alenia Space, with a fruitful cooperation of many European sub-contractors, the results of the performance characterization and calibration of the FCI have been successfully demonstrated. This work has been achieved thanks to the major support and supervision of ESA.
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