Raytheon [RTN] last week unveiled a new focal plane array that it says is four times larger that infrared detectors currently in production and will provide major advances in space-based sensing while making it easier and less costly to design and build such sensors.
The new “4K-by-4K” light-wave detector has two key features, a wide dynamic range and high frame rate, that provides sensors, and potential customers, with “game changing” applications, Doug Marimon, senior program manager with Raytheon’s Space Systems business, told reporters on a conference call. These applications include ballistic missile defense, not only warning of a launch but throughout a missile’s flight trajectory, climate and environmental monitoring, and astronomy, he said.
For missile warning, Marimon said that a “dim event” could be seen more quickly than with current assets. For environmental monitoring, the larger focal plane would enable continuous coverage and provide detailed information of an event such as a storm, he said. Astronomers could use the sensors with the array to look deeper into time, Marimon said.
The 4K-by-4K array, which consists of 16 million pixels arrayed in 4,096 rows and columns, “allows us to embark on a bunch of sensor designs with much greater persistence, coverage and sensitivity than sensors have had in the past,” Marimon said. “From a technology perspective, no other focal plane of this size has been tested and proven to the extent this one has.”
These include sensors with a wide field-of-view to stare over an entire hemisphere, “unparalleled” coverage of “fleeting” events, the ability to identify dimmer targets, and ones that are easier to design, build and test, he said.
The wide dynamic range makes the 4K-by-4K focal plane “ideal” for space applications against a “bright earth and a dark earth,” Marimon said. The frame rate, which he wouldn’t fully disclose, is “many, many times per second,” providing more data that can be processed either on board or on earth depending on the application.
Raytheon has been developing the 4K-by-4K array with its own money and plans to continue to do so, Marimon said. Laboratory tests of the array began last year and have given the company confidence it is ready for space flight, although there is currently no launch customer, he said. Marimon described the testing as environmental and characterizing performance of the arrays.
The ground testing is ongoing and is going well, Marimon said. “We are not concerned at this point about handling the data set coming off of this array. The technology is there and it’s ready for space flight to be able to handle it.” Moreover, the company is already producing the devices at a “phenomenal yield” and can manufacture the arrays, he said.
Marimon said that currently for arrays to be used to cover a wide field of view requires the use of complex mechanisms such as gimbals. However, with the 4K-by-4K array, the cost of sensors can be reduced by doing away with the moving components, he said.
The pixel size in the device is 20 square microns and the array itself is about 8 centimeters per side, Marimon said.
As far as whom Raytheon is talking to about the array, Marimon declined to be specific but said it includes the U.S. government and military. The feedback so far is “positive,” he said.