Microbolometer in space: IASI and PICASSO-CENA

Microbolometers are infrared detectors of an emerging technology mainly dev eloped in US and few other countries for few years. The main targets of the se developments are low performing military and civilian applications like survey cameras. Applications in space are now arising thanks to the design simplification a nd the associated cost reduction allowed by this new technology. The paper describes two applications in development in SODERN : an infrared camera for the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IA SI): this camera integrated in IASI is used to take pictures of the main in strument field of view and to correlate them with other instrument measurem ents; an infrared radiometer for PICASSO-CENA based on the same camera design. In both cases, the use of microbolometer detectors leads to very competitive designs in terms of volume, mass, power consumption and cost. (C) 2001 International Astronautical Federation. Published by Elsevier Scie nce Ltd.