Pictures of Earth from space are captivating, but not so easy to capture. Down here, we worry about lighting, focus and composition when we snap pics for social media. But in the harsh climate of space, the fundamentals of photography are less of a concern. The challenges in that environment include extreme temperatures and high levels of radiation that interfere with the equipment, as well as transmitting high-resolution images across communication systems with low bandwidth.
Two UCF researchers, Department of Materials Science and Engineering and CREOL Assistant Professor Leland Nordin, and CREOL Professor Shuo Sean Pang, are developing an infrared imager that can overcome these limitations. Their team is led by Sandia National Laboratories, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratory. The three-year, $450,000 project is funded by the Photonic Enabled Tera-scale InfraRed Imager (PETRI) Grand Challenge Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, which asks researchers to create the next generation of infrared-imaging technologies.
“The Grand Challenge programs bring people with expertise together to solve a problem for a period of three years, says Shuo Sean Pang, a professor in CREOL and co-principal investigator of the project. “Through the program, we can tackle solving a technology problem that we choose.”
Building a Better Camera
The lead on the project is Nordin, who shares a joint appointment between the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and CREOL. He is using his knowledge of materials and his expertise in photonics to create some of the hardware for the camera while Pang and his team work on data encoding and transmission.
Nordin will use radiation-tolerant materials and a form of nanostructuring known as atomic layer deposition to fabricate the semiconductor that can detect infrared light.
“You put the wafer, known as the substrate, and different target elements inside the chamber, you then warm up the ovens which hold the elements so they come out of the oven and fly toward the substrate, building it up atomic layer by atomic layer,” he says. “It’s like spray-painting with atoms.”
At the same time, Pang and his team, which includes optics and photonics doctoral student Andrew Klein, will determine how to transmit a high-resolution image from space with minimum energy consumption from the hardware. Pang says the collaboration with Sandia allows them to try out different ideas, including non-traditional forms of data encoding to achieve high efficiency in communication, while maintaining the image quality.
The Key Component: Collaboration
For this team, collaboration is a key component of the project. Pang has worked with Sandia for three years now and Klein previously completed an internship with the national laboratory.
Klein says his internship provided a great training ground for this current project and he hopes to work for a national lab or a space-focused engineering organization after graduation.
“I love the Space Coast,” he says. “I think there are lots of opportunities to apply space photonics. Engineers don’t usually consider using optics to solve problems like communication, but they can benefit from seeing things differently.”
Nordin says he’s particularly excited about working with fellow CREOL researchers and is glad this national challenge fostered a partnership with someone who literally works next door.
“These projects are fun because it’s a new modality,” he says. “You get to learn about problems and find solutions to things that you don’t particularly do.”
About the Researchers
Leland Nordin is an assistant professor in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and holds a joint appointment with CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics. His cutting-edge research focuses on next-generation semiconductor materials and devices, covering design, growth, fabrication and characterization. For his work, Nordin has received the Army Research Office Early Career Program Award. Prior to UCF, Nordin was a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University’s Geballe Lab for Advanced Materials. He earned his doctoral and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.De
Sean Pang is an associate professor at CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Caltech and conducted his postdoctoral research at Duke University. His current research focuses on the intersection on computing and imaging systems. His group is interested in modeling and developing optoelectronic system for sensing, imaging and computing applications, including the application of AI in solving imaging and photonic design problems.
