An exceptional year at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Bothwell, Mary.
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A viewgraph presentation describing the the six phases of a space mission is shown. The contents include: 1) What Does Planning Involve?; 2) Designing the Flight System; 3) Building the Flight System; 4) Testing the Flight System; 5) Flying the Mission; and 6) Analyzing the Data.
My division was charged with building a suite of cameras for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project. We were building the science cameras on the mass assembly, the microscope camera, and the hazard and navigation cameras for the rovers. Not surprisingly, a lot of folks were paying attention to our work - because there's really no point in landing on Mars if you can't take pictures. In Spring 2002 things were not looking good. The electronics weren't coming in, and we had to go back to the vendors. The vendors would change the design, send the boards back, and they wouldn't work. On our side, we had an instrument manager in charge who I believe has the potential to become a great manager, but when things got behind schedule he didn't have the experience to know what was needed to catch up. As division manager, I was ultimately responsible for seeing that all my project and instrument managers delivered their work. I had to make the decision whether or not to replace him.
The Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) will contain three cryogenically cooled infrared instruments: the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC), the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS), and the Multiband Infrared Photometer for SIRTF (MIPS). These instruments are sensitive to infrared radiation in the 1.8-1,200 micrometer range. This paper will discuss the three instruments' functional requirements and their accommodation in the SIRTF telescope system.
The Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) will have three science instruments, the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) which will obtain multispectral images between 1.8 micron and 26 microns, the Infrared Spectrometer (IRS) which is a set of two dispersive spectrometers covering the wavelength range between 2.5 and 200 microns, and the Multiband Imaging Photometer for SIRTF (MIPS) which is a general-purpose photometric instrument which operates between 30 and 1,200 microns. Taken together, the full wavelength range of these instruments extends from 1.8 micron to 1,200 microns, equivalent to nearly a factor of 700 in photon energy and diffraction limited image size. In addition to supporting this unprecedented spectral and optical coupling requirement, the SIRTF detectors must operate at lower temperatures than previously demonstrated and be optimized for new levels of performance in order to achieve the goals of the science mission. Thus, development of the detector arrays for the SIRTF instruments is one of the most challenging aspects of the instrument development activities.
Short-wavelength (1-2.5-micron) 128x128 focal plane arrays have been fabricated and demonstrated with high pixel yields and dark-current-limited performance. The detector material is HgCdTe grown by LPE on a sapphire substrate which yields high-performance uniform detectors. The detector arrays were characterized at temperatures of 80-150 K; the peak quantum efficiency at 2.4 microns is 80 percent. The multiplexer is a Reticon FET switch with output amplifiers. It is noted that the long-term goal of this project is to develop a 150x1000 mosaicked focal plane for use in the HIRIS instrument on the Earth Observing System.