Rockwell Scientific to Provide IR Sensors for Telescope

Rockwell Scientific Co. LLC of Thousand Oaks, Calif., has been awarded a contract from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to provide infrared focal plane arrays for the James Webb Space Telescope near-infrared camera. Integral to the camera, the detector arrays will enable sensitive measurements that are important to the mission of the telescope, which is to determine the first light-emitting objects from the universe after the big bang.

The camera, known as the NIRCam, also is designed to study star formations in the Milky Way galaxy and to discover and describe planets beyond our solar system. The large-format, low-noise arrays will be produced at Rockwell's new facility in Camarillo, Calif.

The telescope's NIRCam IR-sensor team includes Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, United Microelectronics Corp., GL Scientific and Conceptual Analytics LLC. Marsha Rieke of the University of Arizona is the principal investigator for the project.