Final Report for the Multi-Sensing Particle Detectors for Materials DegradationAnalysis (MPDMDA) Project

摘要

In recent years scientific spacecraft have been significantly reduced in size,power, and mass with accompanying reductions in resources allocated to scientific instrumentation. The continuation of science investigations on spacecraft requires the development of smaller, less resource intensive sensors. The difficulty is that smaller sensors often mean smaller apertures and this typically accompanies loss of signal and resolution. There are three different areas where major sensor size reductions are possible: sensors where detector/electronic noise dominates; sensors for large signal/low resolution detection; and sensors which apply detectors and circuitry in new ways. All of these methodologies can leverage the continual improvements being made in micro-electronics and multisensors. This work is an investigation of all three areas of sensor resource reduction: avalanche photodiodes were investigated as a new use of a well known detector to improve detector system resource requirements for plasma sensors; Rutherford Backscatter Spectroscopy (RBS) sensors were investigated as a sentinel measurement for spacecraft contamination; and masked CCDs are both a new use of an old sensor for high signal regimes and useable for sentinel devices. All of these techniques lend themselves to a multisensor approach where one sensor or a sensor array can be used to make a measurement in several different regimes because of their small sizes, tendency to be packaged as arrays, and the ease with which they can be masked or coated to look at different regimes.