That OCO acronym is pretty clever. I got to visit a few Caltech labs but not JPL. I wasn't much into rocketry at the time, so I'm sort of catching up here. I imagine when information travels from my eyeballs to my fingertips, bits of it stay behind in memory cells so that I get to "learn" some of it for the long run.
Next:
PRISM stands for Portable Remote Imaging SpectroMeter. It covers a wavelength range from 350 nm to 1050 nm. The same unit also includes a separate radiometer covering two bands at 1240 and 1610 nm in order to provide accurate atmospheric correction of the ocean color measurements.
The complete unit weighs about 40 kg with the electronics and is for being installed in a vacuum chamber to be carried by an aircraft. Three vibration isolators prevent high frequency vibration from transmitting to the optics and detectors mounted in a vacuum vessel. The temperature of the instruments is kept at 25Ā°C through bi-directional thermoelectric coolers. The spectrometer detector is running at a temperature of about 7Ā°C. Shutters for the SWIR radiometer and spectrometer provide dark frame acquisition. An operatorās task is to click on a software ārecordā or āstopā button at the beginning and end of a flight line. Data is recorded in solid state drives.
The unit can be mounted on a Twin Otter, and in the near future, on NASA's high altitude ER-2 and the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s/National Center for Atmospheric Research's (NSF/NCAR) Gulfstream GV.
Current satellite data provide a broad overview of natural and human-induced events from tsunamis to toxic blooms and oil spills, but do not have the necessary spectral, spatial and temporal, resolution to characterize and understand them.
PRISM covers that gap by flying below cloud altitudes and resolving spatial features as small as 30 cm.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/portable-remote-imaging-spectrometer-prism
https://prism.jpl.nasa.gov/news_info.html