Imaging Laboratory Improving Telescopic Technology
Michael Lesser is director of the UA's Imaging Technology Laboratory, which turns out about 200 imaging detectors each year.
A sample of detectors that have been developed over the years.
Fewer than 20 staff members and students work at the Imaging Technology Center, a 11,000-square-foot nondescript building south of the UA campus that is making devices to enhance telescopes.
Companies from all over the world contract the services provided by the UA's Imaging Technology Laboratory.
The technology that helps astronomers to capture images of objects with very minimal light is being advanced at a University of Arizona laboratory.
In an 11,000-square-foot nondescript building south of the UA campus sits the UA's Imaging Technology Laboratory.
“There, a staff of 10 plus three undergraduate researchers and one graduate student run an operation that creates devices that pick up nearly every single arriving photon, resulting in a more efficient imaging process for people turning their eyes to stars and celestial bodies.”
“Any time you don’t have a great deal of light you need a really good camera that can collect nearly every single photon that comes into the telescope,” said Michael Lesser, who directs ITL, which turns out about 200 imaging detectors each year.
Originally founded in 1989 to develop microelectronics chips for the UA’s Steward Observatory, the Imaging Technology Laboratory does not fabricate the detectors on site.
Instead, sponsors from around the world contract the lab’s services and send over their silicon wafers, which ITL then works to enhance or optimize to improve their response to light, decrease their noise, and increase their spectra sensitivity.
At the end of this process come highly efficient detectors that can cost upwards from $100,000.
“The CCD imaging devices are almost perfect imaging devices, as far as their sensitivity to light and their geometric precision,” said Sumedha Uppnor, a mechanical engineering graduate student who serves as a graduate assistant in the laboratory. A CCD, or a charge-coupled device, is a detector that is made on a silicon wafer.
Uppnor is helping to design a bonding machine that laminates wafers to imagers. The project, which is funded by NASA, will be used to develop the “next generation of very large, multi-detector cameras," Lesser said.”
The machine is one piece of the larger operation that is creating some of the world’s most advanced detectors to serve industry in both scientific and astronomical applications.
Roy Tucker, a UA senior engineer who works in the laboratory, said "there are maybe four or five" facilities in the world producing similar devices.
To explain the importance of precision in this process, Tucker equates the work of the lab to building an auditorium for musical performances.
“It’s sort of like you’re charged with designing a concert hall,” Tucker said. “You have to worry about the dimension of the hall, the stage and the walls so that the audience has the full range of sounds.”
Similarly, the work at ITL involves evaluating a wide range of variables but instead of the perfect sound, the scientists want the perfect image.
The technology is a more advanced version of what is commonly used to create imagers for digital cameras, video cameras and cellular phones, among other devices. For scientists, especially astronomers, the technology leads to more efficient imaging and the ability to detect some of the shorter wavelengths more clearly, such as ultraviolet rays.
Much of the work the laboratory does is related to astronomy and attempts to improve the imaging technologies found in telescopes. The lab also optimizes Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor imagers, considered to be the “up and coming” sensor technology, Lesser said.
That’s one of reason why some of the most prominent companies and organizations are seeking out help from the UA laboratory.
Among the list of companies and institutions that have or are currently using ITL’s services are the University of Montreal, Beijing Astrophysical Observation, the National Observatory of Athens, John Hopkins University, Ohio State University, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Lockheed Martin Corp.
Without such technology, industry would have to build telescopes that are more expensive and bigger to do the same job, said Lesser, who also is a senior research scientist for the UA’s Steward Observatory and a research professor of optical sciences. “Or, maybe they wouldn’t be able to do the job at all.”
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