HiRISE focal plane for use on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Abstract

The primary mission of the upcoming HiRISE instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft is to better understand the geologic and climatic processes on Mars and to evaluate future landing sites. To accomplish this goal, a high resolution space-based camera is being developed that employs a 0.5m aperture Cassegrain-type telescope coupled to a large focal plane array (FPA) measuring approximately (L) x 2 (W) x 2 (D). The FPA is populated with 14 time delay and integrate (TDI) format custom charge-coupled device (CCD)-based detectors. The FPA includes panchromatic, near infrared, and blue-green spectral channels. The panchromatic channel has 20,000 pixels in the cross track direction. Each color channel consists of 4,000 pixels in the cross track direction. The minimum ground sampling distance of all channels is 50 cm per pixel. The instrument’s instantaneous field of view is 1.43o x 0.1o. Over the 5-year mission, the FPA will map a portion of the surface of Mars with high spatial resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio (>100:1 at all latitudes). Electronics are housed immediately behind the FPA, which yields a low noise, compact design that is both robust and fault tolerant. Test and characterization data from the FPA and custom CCD-based detectors is discussed along with the results from performance models.