Nimbus-7 carried eight scientific instruments: Limb infrared monitoring of the stratosphere (LIMS), Stratospheric and mesopheric sounder (SAMS), Coastal-zone color scanner (CZCS), Stratospheric aerosol measurement II (SAM II), Earth radiation budget (ERB), Scanning multichannel microwave radiometer (SMMR), Solar backscatter UV and total ozone mapping spectrometer (SBUV/TOMS), and Temperature-humidity infrared radiometer (THIR).

The Earth Radiation Budget (ERB) experiment on the Nimbus 7 satellite is a multipurpose experiment used to measure the solar irradiance, the Earth's reflected solar
radiation, and the Earth's emitted longwave radiation. The ten-channel solar telescope was designed to measure the total solar irradianceas well as several spectral bands. Channel10c (where c stands for cavity) is a Hickey-Friedenelectrically self-calibrating, thermopile-based, cavity radiometer with an estimated at-launch
accuracy of 0.5% relative to the absolute radiation scale. The estimated instrument stability is ~0.03%.