Sky Background Research Articles

How diving flies navigate in for the kill

Snatching their next meal often requires insects to attack upwards, as their prey is more easily visible towards a clear sky background. But this is not the case for killer flies (Coenosia attenuata), which take the risk of performing swift aerial dives to grab their prey from above. Intrigued by this behaviour, Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido from the University of Minnesota, USA, with Sergio Rossoni from the University of Cambridge, UK, and collaborators from Cambridge and the University of Lincoln, UK, set off to understand how these dives compare with upwards or sideways attacks more commonly found in insects in the wild to learn about the flies’ unorthodox hunting strategy.The team released pairs of killer flies in a transparent rectangular arena, dangled a moving black bead in front of them to give them a target to attack, and filmed their hunting manoeuvres in 3D using high-speed cameras. The researchers then used the recordings to extract the flies’ velocity and acceleration during each dive and found that the flies that were taking off from the ceiling reached significantly higher accelerations than those taking off from the walls or the floor of the arena. The dive accelerations were also higher than those measured in free-falling unconscious killer flies, suggesting that they work together with gravity to propel themselves downwards even faster. The researchers also found that the aeronauts could use the angle of their line of sight – the imaginary line between the fly and its prey – to time their take-off to target and influence their dive angle.Aiming to understand how these flight characteristics affect the flies’ hunting strategy, the researchers looked into the factors that determine how the killers navigate in for a kill. Do the flies head directly toward their target, or do the killers observe how their meal changes direction to predict where their victim is going to arrive and aim to intercept it at some point in the future? The researchers converted these strategies into mathematical models, used the data for the position and velocity of real flies and the position of the bead target, and simulated potential flight paths that could have resulted from each strategy. They then compared those paths with the real-life trajectories of the killers and were able to show that the second strategy, where the attackers aim to intercept their quarry at some point in the future, best predicted the killer flies’ paths, no matter where they took off from. However, they also noted that the flies that took off from the ceiling and further ahead of their target were particularly vulnerable to missing their meal. The researchers then adapted their model of the flies’ navigation strategy to include the acceleration needed for the killers to turn a corner and attempt a follow-up attack – a measure of the steering effort required – and showed an even higher compatibility of this adapted model to real-life flight trajectories.But why perform aerial dives given the additional steering effort required, compared with a direct attack from below? Well, for starters, Gonzalez-Bellido and her colleagues discovered that dives provide the fastest route for a first encounter with a victim and that plummeting from above produces a greater impact than attacks mounted from the walls or the floor of the arena. If, in addition, we include that killer flies in the wild are not limited by the size of a laboratory flight arena and would certainly attack again after the first near-miss, there is only one conclusion to make: dives are a powerful attack strategy, but a head start isn't helpful if you are a hungry fly.

Application of the Gaussian modeling algorithm to a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor for daylight adaptive optics.

Daytime use of Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWS)-based adaptive optics (AO) at a telescope is hindered by the fluctuating bright sky background. Therefore, we propose a Gaussian modeling centroid extraction algorithm that performs real-time daylight AO closed-loop corrections. The algorithm is executed in the process of modeling and updating each pixel of the consecutive SHWS images. The simulation results show that our method can provide a lower centroid estimation error (CEE) for bright sky background conditions. We also performed a field experiment on a 2 m ground-based telescope and achieved a daylight AO correction of 2.1 times diffraction limit for a star with a visual magnitude of 4.7 (HIP113116) when the elevation angle of the sun was 7.7°. This represents the first publicly reported daylight natural guide star AO correction result on a 2 m class telescope.

Discovery of a possible splashback feature in the intracluster light of MACS J1149.5+2223

ABSTRACT We present an analysis of the intracluster light (ICL) in the Frontier Field Cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 (z = 0.544), which combines new and archival Hubble WFC3/IR imaging to provide continuous radial coverage out to 2.8 Mpc from the brightest cluster galaxy (BCG). Employing careful treatment of potential systematic biases and using data at the largest radii to determine the background sky level, we reconstruct the surface brightness profile out to a radius of 2 Mpc. This radius is the largest to which the ICL has been measured for an individual cluster. Within this radius, we measure a total luminosity of 1.5 × 1013 L⊙ for the BCG plus ICL. From the profile and its logarithmic slope, we identify the transition from the BCG to ICL at r ∼ 70 kpc. Remarkably, we also detect an apparent inflection in the profile centred in the 1.2–1.7 Mpc (0.37–0.52 r200m) radial bin, a signature of an infall caustic in the stellar distribution. Based upon the shape and strength of the feature, we interpret it as potentially being at the splashback radius, although the radius is smaller than theoretical predictions. If this is the splashback radius, then it is the first such detection in the ICL and the first detection of the splashback radius for an individual cluster. Similar analyses should be possible with the other Frontier Field clusters, and eventually with clusters observed by the Euclid and Roman missions.

An Optimal Estimator of Intrinsic Alignments for Star-forming Galaxies in IllustrisTNG Simulation

Abstract Emission line galaxies (ELGs), more generally star-forming galaxies, are valuable tracers of large-scale structure and therefore main targets of upcoming wide-area spectroscopic galaxy surveys. We propose a fixed-aperture shape estimator of each ELG for extracting the intrinsic alignment (IA) signal, and assess the performance of the method using image simulations of ELGs generated from the IllustrisTNG simulation including observational effects such as the sky background noise. We show that our method enables a significant detection of the IA power spectrum with the linear-scale coefficient A IA ≃ (13–15) ± 3.0 up to z = 2, even from the small simulation volume ∼ 0.009 ( h − 1 Gpc ) 3 , in contrast to the null detection with the standard method. Thus the ELG IA signal, measured with our method, opens up opportunities to exploit cosmology and galaxy physics in high-redshift universe.

Commercial-off-the-shelf event-based cameras for space surveillance applications

Event-based cameras (EBCs) are of interest for potential application to space domain awareness (SDA). EBC attributes, including asynchronous response and low latency provide data reduction, break the trade-off between latency and power, and enable consideration of additional algorithms and processing architectures due to individual timestamps for each event. Potential data reduction by a factor of 10 or greater is particularly attractive for SDA from satellite platforms with constraints on system power, processing, and communication bandwidth. Here we report our initial evaluation of Prophesee third-generation commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) EBCs, including development of, and comparison with, a limiting magnitude model. The analytic model is a function of sky background radiance; EBC parameters including contrast threshold, dark current, pixel pitch, and spectral quantum efficiency; and the optic aperture diameter and focal length. Using an 85 mm f/1.4 lens, the measured detection limits for the half-size video graphics array (HVGA) and video graphics array (VGA)-format EBCs are 6.9 and 9.8 visual magnitudes (mV), respectively, at a sky background level of about 20.3mV per square arcsecond. The empirical sensitivity limit for the VGA differs by 0.1mV from our analytic prediction of 9.7 (less than 10% difference in flux). The limiting magnitude model assumes slow motion of point objects across the EBC focal plane array. Additional experiments exploring temporal behavior show that no stars are detected while scanning across the night sky faster than 0.5 deg per second using the VGA-EBC mounted to a 200 mm f/2.0 lens. The limited sensitivity of the evaluated COTS EBCs prevents their use as a replacement for typical CCD/CMOS framing sensors, but EBCs show clear promise for small-aperture, large-field persistent SDA in terms of their efficient capture of temporal information.

A machine learning model pipeline for detecting wet pavement condition from live scenes of traffic cameras

Highway safety is largely influenced by weather conditions that have become increasingly volatile due to the climate change. It well known that wet pavement significantly reduces surface friction, leading to inflated collision risk. Thus, timely knowledge of the road surface condition is critical for safe driving. In this paper, a novel machine learning model pipeline is proposed to detect the wetness of pavement based on live images of highway scenes captured by publicly accessible traffic cameras. To simplify the learning task, we finetuned the state-of-the-art instance segmentation baseline models to extract background instance targets, including pavement, sky, and vegetation, which are common in highway scenes. Then, the color mixture attributes in HSV (hue, saturation and value) of each segmented instance were extracted and used as visual cues for inferring pavement condition. Finally, gradient boosting ensemble classifiers are constructed and trained using the HSV features to predict the wetness of pavement. For the segmentation task, we leveraged Detectron2 baseline models (Mask R-CNN) and evaluated three backbone networks: R50-FPN, R101-FPN, and X101-FPN. For the classification task, two most popular gradient boosting algorithms (XGBoost and CatBoost) were evaluated together with a classic logistic model. Based on experiments with our custom dataset, the best performance (F1 score: 0.927, AUC: 0.975) was achieved by the R101-FPN backbone coupled with the CatBoost classifier.

Research on Working Target Detection of Bulldozer Based on Binocular Vision

Aiming at the problem of bad working environment of bulldozer in landfill, this paper presents a target detection method suitable for autonomous working bulldozer. Firstly, the working environment information was obtained by the binocular camera, the maximum inter-class variance method was used to remove the sky background by binarization of the image, and the color component of the ground was extracted from the HSV color space and converted into a binarization image. The absolute value of the difference between the two binarization images was the approximate area of the working target. Then the binocular camera was calibrated and the feature points were detected and matched in the target area. The parallax was obtained by triangulation principle to obtain the depth information of the target. The experimental results show that the method can correctly extract the depth information of the target area and target, and the accuracy is high, which can meet the requirements of the bulldozer in the landfill for target detection.

The Stereoscopic Analog Trigger of the MAGIC Telescopes

The current generation of ground-based imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) operate in the very-high-energy (VHE) domain from ~100 GeV to ~100 TeV. They use electronic digital trigger systems to discern the Cherenkov light flashes emitted by extensive air showers (EASs), from the overwhelming light of the night sky (LoNS) background. Near the telescope energy threshold, the number of emitted Cherenkov photons by gamma-ray-induced EASs is comparable to the fluctuations of the LoNS and the photon distribution at the Cherenkov-imaging camera plane becomes patchy. This results in a severe loss of effectiveness of the digital triggers based on combinatorial logic of thresholded signals. A stereoscopic analog trigger system has been developed for improving the detection capabilities of the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) telescopes at the lowest energies. It is based on the analog sum of the photosensor electrical signals. In this article, the architectural design, technical performances, and configuration of this stereoscopic analog trigger, dubbed “Sum-Trigger-II,” are described.

A Sea–Sky Line Detection Method Based on the RANSAC Algorithm in the Background of Infrared Sea–Land–Sky Images

Subgrade sea and sky monitoring equipment requires the accurate detection of threat targets in a given area. Due to the extremely complex sea–land–sky backgrounds, the sea–sky line is often submerged in the background. Therefore, we propose an algorithm for accurately detecting sea–sky lines under a complex sea–land–sky background. Based on the analysis of infrared images with sea–land–sky backgrounds, we segment images using the k-means algorithm. To use the random sampling consistency (RANSAC) algorithm to fit the sea–sky line better, we divide the images into nonuniform segments and count the row mean-value gradient trough. The experimental results show that the sea–sky line can be detected in 1215 out of 1227 pictures. The test success rate is 99%, and the difference from the actual sea–sky line is less than 3 pixels. The method presented has higher adaptability under a subgrade sea and sky monitoring environment.

DAWIS: a detection algorithm with wavelets for intracluster light studies

Context. Large numbers of deep optical images will be available in the near future, allowing statistically significant studies of low surface brightness structures such as intracluster light (ICL) in galaxy clusters. The detection of these structures requires efficient algorithms dedicated to this task, which traditional methods find difficult to solve. Aims. We present our new detection algorithm with wavelets for intracluster light studies (DAWIS), which we developed and optimized for the detection of low surface brightness sources in images, in particular (but not limited to) ICL. Methods. DAWIS follows a multiresolution vision based on wavelet representation to detect sources. It is embedded in an iterative procedure called synthesis-by-analysis approach to restore the unmasked light distribution of these sources with very good quality. The algorithm is built so that sources can be classified based on criteria depending on the analysis goal. We present the case of ICL detection and the measurement of ICL fractions. We test the efficiency of DAWIS on 270 mock images of galaxy clusters with various ICL profiles and compare its efficiency to more traditional ICL detection methods such as the surface brightness threshold method. We also run DAWIS on a real galaxy cluster image, and compare the output to results obtained with previous multiscale analysis algorithms. Results. We find in simulations that DAWIS is on average able to separate galaxy light from ICL more efficiently, and to detect a greater quantity of ICL flux because of the way sky background noise is treated. We also show that the ICL fraction, a metric used on a regular basis to characterize ICL, is subject to several measurement biases on galaxies and ICL fluxes. In the real galaxy cluster image, DAWIS detects a faint and extended source with an absolute magnitude two orders brighter than previous multiscale methods.

The estimate of sensitivity for large infrared telescopes based on measured sky brightness and atmospheric extinction

In order to evaluate the ground-based infrared telescope sensitivity affected by the noise from the atmosphere, instruments and detectors, we construct a sensitivity model that can calculate limiting magnitudes and signal-to-noise ratio (S/N). The model is tested with tentative measurements of M′-band sky brightness and atmospheric extinction obtained at the Ali and Daocheng sites. We find that the noise caused by an excellent scientific detector and instruments at −135° C can be ignored compared to the M′-band sky background noise. Thus, when S/N = 3 and total exposure time is 1 second for 10 m telescopes, the magnitude limited by the atmosphere is 13.01m at Ali and 12.96m at Daocheng. Even under less-than-ideal circumstances, i.e., the readout noise of a deep cryogenic detector is less than 200e− and the instruments are cooled to below −87.2° C, the above magnitudes decrease by 0.056m at most. Therefore, according to observational requirements with a large telescope in a given infrared band, astronomers can use this sensitivity model as a tool for guiding site surveys, detector selection and instrumental thermal-control.

Geometry near the inner horizon of a rotating, accreting black hole

Here we present a novel classical model to describe the near-inner horizon geometry of a rotating, accreting black hole. The model assumes spacetime is homogeneous and is sourced by radial streams of a collisionless, null fluid, and it predicts that the standard Poisson-Israel mass inflation phenomenon will be interrupted by a Kasner-like collapse toward a spacelike singularity. Thus, the inner horizon and any additional structure beyond it never gets a chance to form. Such a model is shown to be valid near the inner horizon of astrophysically realistic black holes through comparison to the conformally separable Kerr model, which provides a natural connection of the Kerr metric to a self-similar, accreting spacetime. We then analyze the behavior of null geodesics in our model, connecting them to the Kerr metric in order to answer the practical question of what an infalling observer approaching the inner horizon might see. We find that an infalling zero-energy observer near the inner horizon will initially see streams of matter accelerating at high energies along the radial direction. Then, within a short span of proper time, the geometry will enter a collapse phase as most of the background sky becomes squashed along the edge of the black hole's shadow. Classically, the observer's journey will end here at a spacelike singularity, though the final outcome of the collapse will require a future calculation of the quantum back reaction within this framework.

UVscope and its application aboard the ASTRI-Horn telescope

UVscope is an instrument, based on a multi-pixel photon detector, developed to support experimental activities for high-energy astrophysics and cosmic ray research. The instrument, working in single photon counting mode, is designed to directly measure light flux in the wavelengths range 300-650 nm. The instrument can be used in a wide field of applications where the knowledge of the nocturnal environmental luminosity is required. Currently, one UVscope instrument is allocated onto the external structure of the ASTRI-Horn Cherenkov telescope devoted to the gamma-ray astronomy at very high energies. Being co-aligned with the ASTRI-Horn camera axis, UVscope can measure the diffuse emission of the night sky background simultaneously with the ASTRI-Horn camera, without any interference with the main telescope data taking procedures. UVscope is properly calibrated and it is used as an independent reference instrument for test and diagnostic of the novel ASTRI-Horn telescope.

An analytical model of zenith radiance under different atmosphere and earth-surface conditions for JHKs bands

The application of star sensor navigation to aircraft and ships is a significant development direction. Due to the intense sky background radiation in the daytime, it is difficult for a visible-light camera to detect stars effectively in near-earth space, the development of a short-wavelength infrared (SWIR, especial for JHKs bands) detector provides the possibility for it. However, in the system design, simulation verification, and software integration of star sensor based on SWIR, a mass of sky background data of JHKs bands under different atmosphere and earth-surface conditions is needed as input. Although the existing atmospheric radiative transfer software can generate large amounts of discrete sky background data in some directions, it has a complicated operation, low efficiency, and time-consuming disadvantage, which is challenging to meet the real-time application in engineering. To use the sky background radiation data more efficiently and conveniently, an analytical model of zenith radiance for JHKs bands is urgent to build. Zenith radiance reference data are generated by libRadtran. Atmospheric absorption function and atmospheric scattering function are used to construct the analytical model of zenith radiance. The Levenberg-Marquardt (L-M) method is used to solve the parameters of the analytical model of zenith radiance. The Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) method is used to optimize the parameters of the analytical model of zenith radiance. The mean relative error between the zenith radiance's analytical function value and the zenith radiance's reference data is calculated to evaluate the accuracy of the constructed analytical model of zenith radiance. The results show that the mean relative errors are no greater than 2.54%, 2.15%, 2.26%; the root mean square errors are no greater than 1.0414, 0.2462, 0.0642; the correlation coefficients are no less than 0.9985, 0.9976, 0.9979 for all combination of cases corresponding to JHKs bands. It indicates that zenith radiance's analytical model constructed is exact and can provide a useful reference for the star sensor's demonstration design and application assessment based on SWIR technology.

Stellar map centroid positioning based on dark channel denoising and feasibility of jitter detection on ZiYuan3 satellite platform

Stellar map denoising and centroid positioning, which directly determine the postpositioning accuracy of star trackers, are key technologies in stellar map processing. Due to the influence of a complex starry sky background, there is often a large amount of noise in stellar maps, which makes it difficult to accurately locate the stellar centroid. A stellar map processing method based on dark channel denoising and continuous multiframe stellar map centroid positioning combined with centroid trajectory constraints is proposed. First, a dark channel noise template is used for denoising, and the single-point and multipoint noises in the denoising result are filtered. Second, in the process of stellar map positioning, if the maximum gray value of the stellar is not unique, it is constrained by the previous stellar positioning result, an adaptive window is established, and the gray-scale centroid weighting method is used to locate the centroid. Then, the star angular distance is used to analyze the precision of the centroid positioning. Finally, the jitter frequency of the satellite platform based on the continuous multiframe centroid positioning result is used to detect satellite attitude. The experimental results show that the performance of dark channel denoising, which can solve many strip noise and background noise problems in stellar maps, is better than that of the existing stellar map denoising method. The centroid positioning results improves the star angular distance by 18.85 arc sec compared with the Gaussian filter and by 8.03 arc sec compared with the global threshold segmentation method, significantly improving the accuracy of stellar map centroid positioning and laying a foundation for improving the star tracker positioning accuracy. A jitter frequency of 0.67 Hz was detected on the ZiYuan3 satellite platform based on the centroid positioning results. It enriches the jitter detection methods and provides a theoretical and technical basis for the design of future high-resolution ground observation remote sensing satellite platforms and geometric accuracy compensation.

Spectral Performance Optimization of Small-Diameter Telescopes for Space Object Detection

Successful tracking and detection of resident space objects (RSOs) requires selection of spectral filters that are capable of compensating for the effects of wavelength dependent atmospheric scattering, and material reflectance properties. When operating in an urban environment such as Atlanta, GA the emitted city light pollution is also an important factor. In this study, we perform a multi-spectral optimization for the Georgia Tech Space Object Research Telescope across the visible through infrared spectrum that accounts for atmospheric turbulence, atmospheric transmission, and background sky radiance. The first contribution of this work is the development of a wavelength-dependent performance metric for the detection of RSOs under different atmospheric conditions. The second contribution is the derivation of a simplified model for light pollution that is based on existing astronomy models. This simplified model accounts for double scattering of light and can be used for adding a light pollution component to sky background results that are generated by complex atmospheric simulation tools. The final contribution is the derivation of novel spectral filters that are tuned to the sub-optimal atmospheric seeing conditions of Atlanta, GA and the RSO materials that are considered in this study. While this study is developed for the geographic region of Atlanta, GA and uses simplified bidirectional reflectance distribution models models for spacecraft materials, the framework is generalizable to different geographic regions, weather conditions, and satellite orientations.

Multi-wavelength observations and modelling of a quiescent cloud LDN1512

Context. Light scattering at near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths has been used to study the optical properties of the interstellar dust grains, but these studies are limited by the assumptions on the strength of the radiation field. On the other hand, thermal dust emission can be used to constrain the properties of the radiation field, although this is hampered by uncertainty about the dust emissivity. Aims. Combining light scattering and emission studies allows us to probe the properties of the dust grains in detail. We wish to study if current dust models allow us to model a molecular cloud simultaneously in the NIR and far-infrared (FIR) wavelengths and compare the results with observations. Our aim is to place constraints on the properties of the dust grains and the strength of the radiation field. Methods. We present computations of dust emission and scattered light of a quiescent molecular cloud LDN1512. We use NIR observations covering the J, H, and KS bands, and FIR observations between 250 and 500 μm from the Herschel space telescope. We constructed radiative transfer models for LDN1512 that include an anisotropic radiation field and a three-dimensional cloud model. Results. We are able to reproduce the observed FIR observations, with a radiation field derived from the DIRBE observations, with all of the tested dust models. However, with the same density distribution and the assumed radiation field, the models fail to reproduce the observed NIR scattering in all cases except for models that take into account dust evolution via coagulation and mantle formation. The intensity from the diffuse interstellar medium like, dust models can be increased to match the observed one by reducing the derived density, increasing the intensity of the background sky and the strength of the radiation field between factors from two to three. We find that the column densities derived from our radiative transfer modelling can differ by a factor of up to two, compared to the column densities derived from the observations with modified blackbody fits. The discrepancy in the column densities is likely caused because of a temperature difference between a modified blackbody fit and the real spectra. The difference between the fitted temperature and the true temperature could be as high as ΔT = +1.5 K. Conclusions. We show that the observed dust emission can be reproduced with several different assumptions about the properties of the dust grains. However, in order to reproduce the observed scattered surface brightness, dust evolution must be taken into account.

SuperBoRG: Search for the Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies and Quasars in HST Parallel Imaging Data*

Abstract The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been providing tremendous survey efficiency via its pure-parallel mode by observing another field in parallel with the primary instrument in operation for the primary observation. In this study, we present a new archival project, SuperBoRG, which aims at compiling data taken in extragalactic parallel programs of HST with the Wide Field Camera 3 in the past decade, including pure-parallel (BoRG, HIPPIES, and COS-GTO) and coordinated-parallel (CLASH and RELICS) programs. The total effective area reaches ∼0.41 deg2 from 4.1 Ms, or 47 days, of observing time, which is the largest collection of optical-to-near-infrared imaging data of HST for extragalactic science. We reduce all data in a consistent manner with an updated version of our data reduction pipeline, including a new sky background subtraction step. When available, imaging data from the Spitzer Space Telescope are also included in photometric analyses. The data set consists of 316 independent sight lines and is highly effective for identification of high-z luminous sources (M UV ≲ −20 mag) at z ∼ 7–12, helping to minimize the effects of cosmic variance. As a demonstration, we present three new z ≳ 7 source candidates, including one luminous galaxy candidate at z phot ∼ 10.4 with M UV ∼ −21.9 mag; the best-fit spectral energy distribution implies a large amount of stellar mass ( ∼ 10) and moderate dust attenuation (A V ∼ 1.4 mag), though the possibility of it being a low-z interloper cannot be completely rejected (∼23%) with the current data set. The data set presented in this study is also suited for intermediate- and low-z science cases.

Wide Band Antenna with Ultra-smooth Spectral Characteristics

Understanding the evolution of Universe is, in the forefront of, the modern day observational cosmology. It requires precise and accurate measurement of cosmological signal, orders of magnitude weaker than the bright sky background. Detection of such a signal having distinct spectral signature, needs an antenna with frequency independent characteristics over more than an octave bandwidth. A spherical monopole antenna has been designed to operate in the frequency range 50-200 MHz with a spectral smoothness of about few parts in 104. The structure has been modeled and optimized using WIPL-D, to minimize spectral features arising out of abrupt reflections of surface currents and frequency dependent radiation patterns. A prototype has been built to validate the design. This paper presents the methodology adopted in the overall antenna design, experiences in its prototyping and simulation and the measurement results.

Cryocooling technologies for the origins space telescope

The Origins Space Telescope’s (Origins) significant improvement over the scientific capabilities of prior infrared missions is based on its cold telescope (4.5 K) combined with low-noise far-IR detectors and ultrastable mid-IR detectors. A small number of new technologies will enable Origins to approach the fundamental sensitivity limit imposed by the natural sky background and deliver groundbreaking science. This paper describes a robust plan to mature the Origins mission, enabling cryocooler technology from current state-of-the-art (SOA) to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5 by 2025 and to TRL 6 by mission Preliminary Design Review. Entry TRLs corresponding to today’s SOA are 4 or 5, depending on the technology in question.