Capabilities Of New Focal Array Demonstrated By Lockheed Martin At SPIE DSS
Mark Goodnough, chief scientist and LM Fellow, and Jeff Scott, senior scientist and LM Fellow, both from Lockheed Martin Santa Barbara Focalplane, discuss a new 1280 x 1024 focal plane that can capture high-quality images at higher temperatures than other focal planes. They also show us some up-close footage of images taken with the technology at the Baltimore Orioles game on April 24.
Video Transcript
Mark Goodnough: Hi. I am Mark Goodnough from the Lockheed Martin Santa Barbara Focalplane facility, where we make indium antimonide focal planes. We are famous for our really high-quality imagery from our digital focal plane readouts, lower noise, and lower power than the comparable analog focal planes that are so common today.
Today, we are talking about our new 1280 x 1024 focal plane based on a new detector material called nBn. The unique thing about nBn is that it allows you to achieve the same water quality images that you can get from indium antimonide, but you are achieving it at much higher temperatures.
The chief advantage of that is a typical indium antimonide 1-megapixel product, 6 pounds, about 18 watts and this size now becomes even more megapixel in a single pound with only a few watts. It makes a huge difference in the size, weight, and power and can enable new missions to happen.
Jeff Scott: Hi. I am Jeff Scott with Lockheed Martin Santa Barbara Focalplane. I am a fellow in developing this technology for the last six years or so. This is an nBn IO detector in a 1280 x 1024 and a 12-micron pitch at HD imagery. It is operating at a temperature of 140 Kelvin, which is about twice as high as our indium antimonide line.
The nBn is a technology that we started developing about six years ago. In the last 50 years, there has been three major classes of infrared technology - mercury cadmium telluride, indium antimonide, and most recently, bolometers.
Since that time, this new technology of nBn is the fourth wave of infrared technology to come out. Lockheed Martin has been the leader in this technology. We’re at this point moving to pilot production. You can see down here this little camera is a 1.3-megapixel that Mark alluded to.
It is about 1 pound, a few watts of power that provides imagery of the type that you are seeing here where we took a picture of the baseball game last night. You can see the level of detail and what it takes to see the actual pixels; how much resolution, which is something that I think we are used to seeing on our phone cameras. We are just not used to seeing it here in the infrared.
It shows how fast in the last four years we have moved from something that was 320 x 256 to now up to 1.3 megapixels and as high as 5 megapixels.