The need for absolute radiometric calibration of space-based sensors will continue to increase as new generations of space sensors are developed. A reflectance-based in-flight calibration procedure is used to determine the radiance reaching the entrance pupil of the sensor. This procedure uses ground-based measurements coupled with a radiative transfer code to characterize the effects the atmosphere has on the signal reaching the sensor. The computed radiance is compared to the digital count output of the sensor associated with the image of a test site. This provides an update to the preflight calibration of the system and a check on the on-board internal calibrator. This calibration procedure was used to perform a series of five calibrations of the Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM). For the 12 measurements made in TM bands 1-3, the RMS variation from the mean as a percentage of the mean is (+OR-) 1.9%, and for measurements in the IR, TM bands 4,5, and 7, the value is (+OR-) 3.4%. The RMS variation for all 23 measurements is (+OR-) 2.8%. The absolute calibration techniques were put to another test with a series of three calibration of the SPOT-1 High Resolution Visible, (HRV), sensors. The ratio, HRV-2/HRV-1, of absolute calibration coefficients compared very well with ratios of histogrammed data obtained when the cameras simultaneously imaged the same ground site. Bands PA, B1 and B3 agreed to within 3%, while band B2 showed a 7% difference. The procedure for performing a satellite calibration was then used to demonstrate how a calibrated satellite sensor can be used to quantitatively evaluate surface reflectance over a wide range of surface features. Predicted reflectance factors were compared to values obtained from aircraft-based radiometer data. This procedure was applied on four dates with two different surface conditions per date. A strong correlation, R('2) = .996, was shown between reflectance values determined from satellite imagery and low-flying aircraft data. Of the 32 predicted reflectance values only six had a difference greater than 0.01. A mean difference of .0007 was obtained for the 32 cases. In addition, a procedure had to be developed to obtain uncorrected digital counts from processed satellite imagery.

An abundance of cosmological evidence suggests that cold dark matter exists and makes up 83% of the matter in the universe. At the same time, this dark matter has eluded direct detection and its identity remains a mystery. Many large international collaborations are actively searching for dark matter through its potential annihilation in high-density regions of the universe, its creation in particle accelerators, and its interaction with Standard Model particles in low-background detectors. One of the most promising dark matter candidates is the weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) which falls naturally out of extensions of the Standard Model. A variety of detectors have been employed in the search for WIMPs, which are expected to scatter with atomic nuclei, yet none have been more successful than dual-phase liquid xenon time projection chambers (TPCs). The first ton-scale liquid xenon TPC, XENON1T, began operating in 2016 and with only 34.2 days of data has set the most strict limits on the WIMP-nucleon interaction cross sections for WIMP masses above 10 GeV/c^2, with a minimum of 7.7 × 10−47 cm^2 for 35 GeV/c^2 WIMPs. One of the major keys to success for liquid xenon TPCs is our understanding of interactions in the medium through myriad measurements. Given that the expected WIMP scattering rate increases with decreasing interaction energy, there has been more focus in recent years in pushing our understanding of interactions in liquid xenon to lower energies. Additionally, as liquid xenon TPCs operate with a large electric field in the medium, an effort has been made to understand how the signal response of xenon changes as a function of the applied electric field. In this thesis, I describe the details of XENON1T, its calibration and characterization, with a special emphasis on the electronic and nuclear recoil calibrations, and the inaugural WIMP search of XENON1T. I then discuss a dedicated measurement, made in the calibration-optimized liquid xenon TPC neriX, of the signal response of low energy nuclear recoils in liquid xenon at electric fields relevant to the dark matter search. The measurements of signal response in XENON1T and neriX were performed using an analysis framework that I developed to allow a more sophisticated examination of recoil responses using GPU-accelerated simulations.