Performances of the SIMBIO-SYS Stereo Imaging Channel (STC) on Board BepiColombo/ESA Spacecraft

The Stereo Imaging Channel (STC) is a double wide angle camera designed to image each portion of the Mercury surface from two different perspectives, providing panchromatic stereo-image pairs required for the Digital Terrain Model (DTM) reconstruction. In addition, selected surface areas will be acquired in color. STC is one of the channels of Spectrometer and Imagers for MPO BepiColombo-Integrated Observatory SYStem. In this work we evaluate the STC Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) for different observation strategies and for the different phases of the BepiColombo mission. The estimation of the SNR is obtained using the radiometric model developed for SIMBIO-SYS, which takes into account the Hapke reflectance model for Mercury surface.