U.S. SPACECRAFT 2000 AND BEYOND

2002 HUBBLE ADVANCED CAMERA

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) is a third-generation axial instrument placed aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The initial design and scientific capabilities of ACS were defined by a team based at Johns Hopkins University.  It was launched on March 1, 2002 as part of Servicing Mission 3B and installed in HST on March 7, replacing the Faint Object Camera (FOC), the last original instrument.  ACS is a highly versatile instrument that became the primary imaging instrument aboard HST.  ACS imagers were fabricated at SITe as well as at Pixel Vision, the company opened by Janesick.

HUBBLE WF/PC III -  4096(V) x 3072(V) x 9 um pixels -  4  - output amplifiers.  Intended for the Hubble WF/PC III camera system, butthe imager was never flown.  Goddard  and Ball Aerospace were selected instead of JPL.  Their imager is shown on the right.

Coming Soon

Work is now going on toward a 10k x 10k imager (100-megapixel).

                                                                                                                                                              Solar Probe Plus will come even closer than SoloHi for solar viewing.

Jim is working with John Hopkins University on the upcoming orbiting Europa mission.   It will use a  2k (V) x 4k (H) x 10 um  backside illuminated  CMOS imager fabricated by Jazz Semiconductor.  The Europa Imaging System (EIS) will have wide and narrow angle cameras and will map most of Europa at 50 meter (164 foot) resolution, and will provide images of areas of Europa's surface at up to 100 times higher resolution than at present in order to search for environmental conditions there that could potentially support life.  This imager was  designed by Jim and has just come out of fabrication (2016) and has tested very well.   Possibly (not yet decided) similar imagers will be used in Europa's star tracker as well as the lander that  has been recently been a hot topic at NASA. 

EUROPA 2k X 4k IMAGER . . FIRST LIGHT

   










2018.   Solar Probe Plus or Solar Probe+, previously NASA Solar Probe, is a planned robotic spacecraft to probe the outer corona of the Sun. It will approach to within 8.5 solar radii (5.9 million kilometers or 3.67 million miles) to the 'surface' (photosphere) of the Sun.[2] The project was announced as a new mission start in the fiscal 2009 budget year. On May 1, 2008 Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory announced it will design and build the spacecraft, on a schedule to launch it in 2015. The launch date has since been pushed back to 2018, with the Delta IV Heavy as the launch vehicle.