The discovery, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, was done using Spitzer's
Infrared Array Camera to observe the planet while it completed an orbit around its host star.
Panasonic recently released its much improved and accurate second generation Grid-EYE
infrared array sensors.
At the heart of this new passive
infrared array is a thermopile IR detector chip, which consists of 64 thermopile elements arranged in an 8x8 format, A built-in thermistor and ASIC chip round out the electronics.
At present VOx (vanadium oxide) microbolometer arrays are the most used technology for uncooled detectors, which are produced in larger volumes than all other
infrared array technologies put together, and this trend is expected to increase in the near future for both military and civilian applications.
Images captured on June 13 with Spitzer's
Infrared Array Camera indicate carbon dioxide is slowly and steadily "fizzing" away from the so-called "soda-pop comet," along with dust, in a tail about 186,400 miles long.
A few years later, new
infrared array detectors marked a further breakthrough.
Once this distant cluster was found, the team studied it with the
Infrared Array Camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope to pinpoint galaxies within the cluster.
An even higher level of security can be obtained using the company's no-tailgating protection, which works with an
infrared array and camera that sends an alarm and pictures of the user and tailgater to the system's command center software.
One example of the smallness of the missile's components is the IR seeker, which uses a staring focal plane
infrared array made of mercury, cadmium, and telluride sealed in a cryogenic dewar.
The team uses Panasonic's Pyrolytic Highly Oriented Graphite Sheet (PGS), the thinnest thermal solution in the world, as well as the Grid-EYE
infrared array thermal sensor.
The two fish-eye lenses house a new
infrared array detector which enhances performance with regard to the range at which a missile firing will be detected, offer improved rejection of false alarms and give an angular localisation capability which will be compatible with the future use of Directional Infrared Counter Measures (Dircm).
The performance of the two short wavelength channels of Spitzer's
Infrared Array Camera is essentially unchanged from what it was before the observatory's liquid helium was exhausted," said Doug Hudgins, the Spitzer program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
