Curved Focal-Plane Arrays Using Back-Illuminated High-Purity Photodetectors

NASA Tech Briefs, October 2003 dimmed (or missing) beacon, making it possible to continue to compensate for vibrations and other motions when the system is partially or totally blind to the beacon. The time during which compensation can be maintained is limited by the accumulation of integration error since the last observation of the beacon at adequate intensity. Typical atmospheric fades last about 1 ms. It has been estimated that compensation could be maintained for times ranging from tens of milliseconds to tens of seconds, depending on the amount of pointing error that can be tolerated. This work was done by Gerardo Ortiz and Shinhak Lee of Caltech for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Further information is contained in a TSP (see page 1). NPO-40061 Beacon CCD