Paper
25 November 1996 General purpose solid state camera for SERTS
Leslie J. Payne, J. Patrick Haas
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics at Goddard Space Flight Center uses a variety of CCD's and other solid state imaging sensors for its instrumentation programs. Traditionally, custom camera systems are built around the imaging device to optimize the circuitry for the particular sensor. This usually produces a camera that is small, uses little power and is elegant. Although these are desirable characteristics, this approach is also expensive and time consuming. An alternative approach is to design a `universal' camera that is easily customized to meet specific mission requirements. This is the approach our team used for SERTS. The camera design used to support the SERTS mission is a general purpose camera design that is derived from an existing camera on the SOHO spacecraft. This camera is designed to be rugged, modest in power requirements and flexible. The base design of the camera supports quadrant CCD devices with up to 4 phases. Imaging devices with simpler architectures are in general supportable. The basic camera is comprised of a main electronics box which performs all timing generation, voltage level control, data processing and compression. A second unit, placed close to the detector head, is responsible for driving the image device control electrodes and amplifying the multichannel detector video. Programmable high voltage units are used for the single stage MCP type intensifier. The detector head is customized for each sensor type supported. Auxiliary equipment includes a frame buffer that works either as a multi-frame storage unit or as a photon counting accumulation unit. This unit also performs interface buffering so that the camera may appear as a piece of GPIB instrumentation.
© (1996) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Leslie J. Payne and J. Patrick Haas "General purpose solid state camera for SERTS", Proc. SPIE 2804, Missions to the Sun, (25 November 1996); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.259710
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KEYWORDS
Cameras

Charge-coupled devices

Clocks

Sensors

Video

Imaging systems

Signal processing

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