SPOSH - Smart Panoramic Sensor
Head
On this page you'll find a collection
of links for SPOSH or SPS, an ESA study financed
by the Technology and Research Program (TRP) to design a camera which could
observe night-time optical phenomena (e.g. meteors, lighting flashes, aurorae)
from orbit. The main development task was to produce a design for a camera
which is much more light-sensitive than current space cameras, and using
a lens with 120 deg field of view which also is a challenge for a space
application (useage of radiation-hardened glass, optical quality for the
used detector).
This study ran from beginning
of 2003 to Dec 2004. Two parallel contracts were awarded, one to Officine
Galileo and University of Turino, Italy, the other one to Jena Optronic
(DJO) and DLR, Germany. Both contracts
have to produce a design for a camera which can be qualified for
flight, and build a breadboard to demonstrate that both hard- and software
can achieve the requirements.
The italian study focusses
on using a so-called electron-multiplied sensor as produced by E2V
and built into an IXON
camera from the company Andor.
The breadboard will contain a commercial lens with a smaller field of fiew.
The DJO study uses a standard
back-illuminated 1k x 1k CCD detector and a newly designed 120 deg ultra-fast
lens to achieve the design goals.
The following links give
more information:
-
Here:
A paper presented at the IMO 2003 describing the scientific requirements
and reference orbit scenarios for the study and some first design ideas,
18-20 Sep 2004
-
Here:
A press release of DLR concerning the DJO/DLR study, showing some first
meteor images - highlight nr. 251 of 29 Nov 2004
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More to come...
Created by
dvk, 05 Dec 2004