Advanced Sensor Components for Space-Based Surveillance and Situational Awareness
Abstract
The ability to reconfigure a sensor in order to enhance performance or perform multiple missions is a very desirable attribute for future sensor systems. If a sensor could reconfigure itself to exploit signals at various wavelengths from the UV through the IR and into the millimeter-wave regimes, that system could support situational awareness missions such as cold-body detection, target discrimination and identification, target status determination, etc., or surveillance missions such as plume-to-hard-body handover, surveillance through clouds, chemical/biological weapons detection, etc., and would be assured of operation 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, in all weather conditions and at very long distances. If this reconfiguration could be done with a single detector, the savings in cost, weight, and power consumption would be substantial. In this paper we present some ideas for tuning the wavelength response of detectors throughout the IR, and possibly into the terahertz (using applied electric or magnetic fields). We also present a device concept for detecting the full polarization vector of a signal within a single pixel of a quantum well detector. Finally, we describe a concept for cooling the detector directly on the chip, pixel by pixel, thereby reducing the volume, weight, and resulting cost of the entire sensor.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA469516
Entities
People
- C. D. Castillo
- D. A. Cardimona
- D. H. Huang
- D. T. Le
- P. M. Alsing
- T. Apostolova
- W. Glass
Organizations
- Air Force Research Laboratory