Performance of the QWIP Focal Plane Array for NASA's Landsat 9 Mission

The flight focal plane array (FPA) for the Thermal Infrared Sensor 2 (TIRS-2) instrument, to be flown on Landsat 9, was built and characterized at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The FPA was assembled using GaAs quantum well infrared photodetector (QWIP) arrays from the same lot as the TIRS instrument on Landsat 8. Each QWIP array is hybridized to an Indigo ISC9803 readout integrated circuit (ROIC) with 640 x 512, 25m by 25m pixels. Each QWIP hybrid was tested at the NASA/GSFC Detector Characterization Laboratory (DCL) as a single sensor chip assembly (SCA). The best SCAs in terms of performance were then built up into an FPA consisting of three SCAs, required to provide the necessary 15-degree field of view of the instrument. The FPA was tested to determine if project requirements were being met as a fully assembled unit. The performance of the QWIP SCAs and the fully assembled, NASA flight-qualified FPA will be reviewed

The Super-TIGER Instrument to Probe Galactic Cosmic Ray Origins

Super-TIGER (Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder) is under construction for the first of two planned Antarctic long-duration balloon flights in December 2012. This new instrument will measure the abundances of ultra-heavy elements (30Zn and heavier), with individual element resolution, to provide sensitive tests of the emerging model of cosmic-ray origins in OB associations and models of the mechanism for selection of nuclei for acceleration. Super-TIGER builds on the techniques of TIGER, which produced the first well-resolved measurements of elemental abundances of the elements 31Ga, 32Ge, and 34Se. Plastic scintillators together with acrylic and silica-aerogel Cherenkov detectors measure particle charge. Scintillating-fiber hodoscopes track particle trajectories. Super-TIGER has an active area of 5.4 sq m, divided into two independent modules. With reduced material thickness to decrease interactions, its effective geometry factor is approx.6.4 times larger than TIGER, allowing it to measure elements up to 42Mo with high statistical precision, and make exploratory measurements up to 56Ba. Super-TIGER will also accurately determine the energy spectra of the more abundant elements from l0Ne to 28Ni between 0.8 and 10 GeV/nucleon to test the hypothesis that microquasars or other sources could superpose spectral features. We will discuss the implications of Super-TIGER measurements for the study of cosmic-ray origins and will present the measurement technique, design, status, and expected performance, including numbers of events and resolution. Details of the hodoscopes, scintillators, and Cherenkov detectors will be given in other presentations at this conference