OTA Cell Image Achieved (May, 2006)
New Hiring Underway (April, 2006)
Spare Boards Shipped to Fermilab (February, 2006)
MONSOON System Shipped to Indiana University (February, 2006)
Development Chassis Shipped to Barcelona (January, 2006)
Partial MONSOON System Delivered to Tucson OTA Lab (January, 2006)
MONSOON Systems Shipped to UIUC (November, 2005)
MONSOON System Delivered to CTIO Lab (November, 2005)
MONSOON System Shipped to Fermilab (October, 2005)
MONSOON System Delivered to KPNO (September, 2005)
MONSOON System Delivered to NEWFIRM Project (May, 2005)
Interim MONSOON System Delivered to WHIRC Project (March, 2005)
MONSOON System Installed on NOAO IR Detector Test Dewar (January, 2005)
MONSOON Open Source Licensing Approved and in Effect (November, 2004)
Orion II bare MUX Readout with the MONSOON Image Acquisition System (July, 2004)
MONSOON Runs CCDs (September, 2003)
Below is a single OTA cell, showing that we can image with the device! This is one of 64 512x512 cells on the device. The OTA is being run by a MONSOON 8 channel CCD system modified for higher voltages on the parallels, which is required to actually run the device. 10 Volts does not work, 12V turns it on and shifts charge. There is more work needed to get rid of the 'excess charge' seen at the bottom of the cell.
Thanks to Dave Sawyer for the picture.
The MONSOON project is hiring two new electronics technicians, one based in La Serena and one in Tucson. The La Serena technician will work with Peter Moore and Ricardo Schmidt on circuit board testing, assembly of systems for delivery, and engineering developments needed for the Blanco Dark Energy Camera and WIYN One-Degree Imager projects. The Tucson technician will work with Dave Sawyer and Mark Hunten on testing of the WIYN QUOTA system and support of the IR version.
A spare set of MONSOON boards, consisting of one Master Control Board, one Clock & Bias Board, and one CCD Acquisition board, were shipped to Fermilab to supplement their development system.
A complete system of the MONSOON CCD controller was shipped to Indiana University. This system includes the Master Control Board, Clock & Bias Board, CCD Acquisition board, and all associated transition boards and fiber interfaces as well as a backplane, chassis and power supply. This system will be incorporated into the FHiRE instrument, Dr. Caty Pilachowski PI, under development for the WIYN telescope.
The MONSOON CCD controller before shipping to IU. This system includes, bottom-to-top, the Master Control Board, the Clock & Bias Board, and the CCD Acquisition Board. Three unused slots in the backplane are covered with blank covers.
A MONSOON development chassis was shipped to Institut de Fisica d'Altes Energies in Barcelona. The IFAE is a participant in the Dark Energy Camera consortium. They will use this chassis to assess the reliability of the Systran fiber interface module and test the S-Link fiber interface scheme. This system includes the Master Control Board, Clock & Bias Board, CCD Acquisition board, and all associated transition boards and fiber interfaces as well as a backplane and chassis.
A preliminary MONSOON system, consisting of a Master Control Board, a Clock & Bias Board and one CCD Acquisition board, as well as a backplane, chassis and power supply, was delivered to the WIYN lab in Tucson for early testing of control schemes for Orthogonal Transfer Array (OTA) CCDs. This system will be supplemented with additional CCD Acquisition Boards to allow testing of larger mosaics of OTA devices, when the additional boards are fully tested and verified.
Two MONSOON CCD systems, each consisting of a Master Control Board, a Clock & Bias Board, a CCD Acquisition Board, a backplane, chassis and all associated transition boards, were shipped to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. UIUC is one of the participants in the Dark Energy Camera consortium, and they will use these systems in their laboratory, in collaboration with the Fermilab group, to develop CCD test procedures, and to evaluate MONSOON technology for possible use in the Dark Energy Camera.
A complete MONSOON CCD system was shipped to the detector testing laboratory at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. This system will support their collaborative involvement in MONSOON engineering development, including developments needed for the Dark Energy Camera project.
A MONSOON CCD system, consisting of a Master Control Board, a Clock & Bias Board, a CCD Acquisition Board, a backplane and chassis, and all associated transition boards, were shipped to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermilab is one of the participants in the Dark Energy Camera consortium, and they will use these systems in their laboratory to develop CCD test procedures, and to evaluate MONSOON technology for possible use in the Dark Energy Camera.
The MONSOON CCD lab controller undergoing testing prior to shipment to Fermilab. The three boards, left-to-right, are the CCD Acquisition Board, the Clock & Bias Board, and the Master Control Board which includes the Systran fiber interface module. The laboratory power supplies (external, on the left) were for testing only.
A complete MONSOON CCD controller was delivered to the Kitt Peak National Observatory engineering staff this month. This system consists of the Master Control Board, Clock & Bias Board, CCD Acquisition Board, backplane and chassis, associated transition boards. The KPNO staff will use this system for training and familiarity, with a goal of integrating it into the WIYN Bench Spectrograph as part of a detector upgrade for that instrument.
A complete MONSOON system for controlling the very large NEWFIRM focal plane was handed over to the NEWFIRM project this month. NEWFIRM (the NOAO Extremely Wide Field IR Imager) has a focal plane mosaic made up of four ORION arrays from Raytheon Vision Systems. Each ORION array provides 64 video channels of output for rapid readout of its 2048x2048 InSb pixels; the entire focal plane thus requires 256 video channels of connection with the MONSOON controller. The MONSOON system for NEWFIRM consists of two separate Pixel Acquisition Nodes (PANs), with each PAN made up of a backplane, a Master Control Board, a Clock Bias Board, and four IR Acquisition Boards, along with all the associated transition boards. There is also a Supervisor program "above" the PANs which provides the essential coordination and image assembly for the unified focal plane.
The MONSOON IR controller for NEWFIRM. This chassis holds the Detector Head Electronics for both PANs needed to control the complete NEWFIRM 4096x4096 focal plane (256 video channels). A US quarter is shown for scale.
This month an interim MONSOON IR controller was delivered to the WHIRC project team. WHIRC is an IR science camera to go on the Tip-Tilt Module for the WIYN telescope. Its focal plane consists of a single Rockwell 2048x2048 pixel array made up of HgCdTe diodes. This is considered an interim shipment because it includes an older version of the IR Acquisition Board that will be replaced when a Board in the latest revision is available. The other boards - Master Control, and Clock & Bias - are the latest versions. This interim system is being supplied now to help the WHIRC team become familiar with the MONSOON controller and experiment with its use on their engineering grade detector.
A MONSOON IR controller was delivered to the NOAO IR Detector Test lab this month. This controller will be used for testing of ORION arrays developed by Raytheon Vision Systems under the foundry run agreement to build detectors for the NEWFIRM instrument. This controller consists of the Master Control Board, the Clock & Bias Board, and two IR Acquisition Boards to support the 64 channels of video output on the ORION controller. It also includes the Linux-based computer for running the Pixel Acquisition Node (PAN) software. Early tests on arrays previously tested with other controllers demonstrate that this MONSOON system is providing detector-noise-limited performance, while supporting the high channel count needed to read the entire ORION array simultaneously.
The laboratory MONSOON IR controller connected to the "Mean Green Machine" IR detector test dewar. The box isn't pretty, but the MONSOON system inside delivers detector-limited performance and rapid readout of the complete ORION array.
AURA and NOAO are proud to announce the release of the MONSOON technology under the umbrella of 'Open Source Licensing'. This has been a long sought after decision that we feel will allow the technology to advance in the common interests of, and be more readily adopted by, observatories requiring a Detector Image Acquisition System to meet future focal plane requirements. We invite you to become a 'Friends of MONSOON' community member and urge you to investigate the possibilities that MONSOON technology will provide for you.
We perceive the benefits of Open Sourcing to be:
For those who are interested, or for people who need more convincing , additional resources concerning Open Source issues are available at http://opensource.org
For completeness, here again are the principle design objectives for MONSOON that is being offered to the community by NOAO:
To read the license agreement and gain access to the MONSOON Technical Archive, please click here
This accomplishment has been possible thanks to the hard work put in by NOAO Directorship, System Instrumentation leadership and the MONSOON development group.
The MONSOON Development Program is funded by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory ("NOAO"), which is operated for the National Science Foundation ("NSF") by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy ("AURA") under Cooperative Agreement No. AST-0132798.
Note: The detector reference columns can be seen in this image as well as 5 bad row-pairs.
MONSOON has read out an Orion II bare MUX in preparation for connecting the camera to a fully functional detector. The Orion II detector is a hybridized 2048 x 2048 InSb NIR detector with sensitivity out to 5um and 64 output channels. The tests conducted with the MONSOON Image Acqusition system are part of a lead up to the development of a 2 x 2 mosaic of these detectors to be employed by the NEWFIRM instrument. MONSOON will be used to characterize further ORION II developments and be the image acquisition system for NEWFIRM. This image was captured and readout in under 1/2 second with a system noise level below 10 e- rms. The current performance tests were performed with a warm mux while imaging an original orientation setup mask: RIO is now known as RVS.
This accomplishment has been possible thanks to hard work put in by the Orion and MONSOON development groups whose members include: Al Fowler, Michael Merrill and Bill Ball from the Orion team; Mark Hunten, John Garcia, Nick Buchholtz, Peter Moore, Gustavo Rahmer, Paul Schmitt, Ron George and Sang Nguyen from the MONSOON team.
The Orion Array Development Program is funded and operated by a consortium - NOAO, USNO Flagstaff, and NASA Ames Research Center - working in conjunction with Raytheon Vision Systems (RVS).
This exposure on the CCD Prototype system shows a slide of the WIYN telescope. It was taken in the Tucson CCD lab using the prototype CCD system that uses Analog Devices AFE chips to do the signal processing. This was read out from one amplifier in 40 seconds. Many thanks to Dave Dryden, Dave Sawyer and the rest of the Monsoon team for working to get this Monsoon first.
Using a Monsoon controller with the IR boards, Mike Warner and Gustavo Rahmer projected a pattern on a Hawaii2 mux and, using a modified version of John Garcia's unscrambling script, got the attached image.
The Hawaii2 bare mux is plugged into a fanout board built for the ISPI project. Missing a proper projection assembly for this setup, they simply projected a pattern cut out on a cardboard box.
The mux was at ambient temperature, and in continuous reset when idle. A single image was taken, with the integration time set to zero. The effective integration time was app 3.4 seconds (the readout time). The readout is made from four channels, just like the ISPI detector. Reading from 32 channels (which is an option available for this device) requires designing a new board, which was out of the scope for this test.
The MONSOON team achieved a significant milestone on Friday, August 8, 2003, when the prototype MONSOON Image Acquisition system read out a full astronomical array for the first time. Team members from left to right are: Peter Moore, Dee Stover, Paul Schmitt, Dave Dryden, John Garcia, Jerry Penegor, Nick Buchholz (seated), Phil Daly, Dave Sawyer. Not shown are Michael Merrill, Kaviraj Chopra, Sang Nguyen, Barry Starr, Gustavo Rahmer and Ricardo Schmidt.
The image below was taken with an engineering grade Aladdin InSb infrared array in the full 1024 x 1024 pixel format readout using 32 video channels. The image was captured using a test dewar and thermal source with a 300ms integration time, a single correlated-double-sample readout and no digital averaging.
The dark framework that dominates the image is part of a mask used for array testing and descrambling algorithm development. Features previously seen on this engineering array are also clearly visible in this image, most notably the "dog's head silhouette" near top center and a defect in this detector in the top right quadrant.
The MONSOON team is now conducting detailed performance tests to compare the results achieved with the new controller to those obtained on this same array with an older controller. Early indications suggest that the noise performance of the MONSOON system meet expected values.
Further bulletins will be posted in the near future as other significant accomplishments are reached.
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NOAO is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc. under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. |
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