The first obvious application of this technology is to one of NASA's many current and planned earth science missions that require space-borne instruments capable of measuring light in the ultraviolet (UV) spectrum. 1) For the Geo-CAPE mission, recommended by the NRC for the Decadal Survey, tropospheric ozone measurements in the UV range of 290 nm-340 nm are required. An instrument based on the proposed technique is very feasible and would offer significant advantages in performance, size and weight over a discrete SiC diode-based approach. 2) For planetary composition experiments such as ATLAS and NOW, an instrument capable of generating a faint object spectrograph in the 115 – 350 nm UV range is also possible using this technology.
Other non-NASA applications include machine vision, industrial controls, safety, diagnostic/inspection systems. Deep UV imaging is of particular interest to semiconductor and scientific imaging markets. UV imaging for LAr neutrino detectors is also being investigated as a scientific application. An Innovation for Manufacturing: The application of the proposed imager to machine vision has major implications for increased automation of inspection tasks that are critical for nanoscale manufacturing.
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