Guy Meynants (left) and Paul Jerram have both been working with image sensor technology for more than 20 years


of pixels will capture a signal at a slightly different time, which could create problems when processing the data for autonomous driving.


Seven minutes of terror Te Cmosis sensors are in the engineering cameras on the rover, but some of the first images released, and what made the descent even more dramatic for those watching, was footage from six Flir Chameleon3 cameras, formerly from Point Grey. Tese captured the entry, descent and landing phase, from the parachute being deployed to the final sky crane manoeuvre over the landing site, where the rover was lowered to the surface from a jetpack. A key part of the landing system was the Lander Vision System camera (LCAM) mounted on the underside of the rover. As the rover descended on the parachute, the LCAM images were correlated to a reference map preloaded on the vehicle to locate itself and land safely. Like the Cmosis technology, the sensor used in LCAM also has Belgian heritage and a tentative connection to Meynants: On Semiconductor’s Python 5000 global shutter chip was developed at the company’s Mechelen site, the former Fillfactory facility – and Meynants was co- founder of Fillfactory before it was bought by On Semiconductor. In terms of the analytical instruments


onboard the rover, a combination of CMOS and CCD detectors are used. Cmosis has a sensor – CV4000, a 2k x 2k device – in the Supercam, which will examine the chemical composition of rocks and soil. Meynants said that the route to include CV4000 in Supercam was a more classical space science project, with a full qualification of the microlenses and scientific work on whether the sensor was suited to the task. Supercam also contains a CCD from


Teledyne e2v, part of Teledyne Imaging, as does the Sherloc instrument – Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals


www.imveurope.com | @imveurope IMVE_59x258_sill optics_apr 21.indd 1 12.03.2021 09:38:56


– which will look for minerals, organic molecules and potential biosignatures. Teledyne Imaging companies also produced key optical components for the Sherloc UV spectrometer, including many of the lenses and mirrors. Both the Teledyne CCDs on Supercam


and Sherloc are 2k wide by 512 pixels high. Here, sensitivity is key, in the visible spectrum but also out into the UV and infrared, according to Paul Jerram, chief engineer at Teledyne e2v. Jerram said that this particular CCD


has a heritage stretching back to the early 1990s. It was originally made for the Royal Greenwich Observatory as a large area detector. After that, what was then e2v made variants of the detector for spectroscopy.


‘It’s a project that’s taken 15 years from start to finish’


A version of the sensor was used onboard


Curiosity, so the work for Perseverance had, to some extent, already been proven. ‘We provide a detector that’s really efficient,’ Jerram said, almost 100 per cent detection efficiency. Te signal returning to the detector from pulses of laser light is not huge, and instruments like Supercam and Sherloc need a sensor with very low noise that captures all of the signal. Jerram said e2v began making sensors for


space science in the 1980s. ‘Effectively, that’s meant our technology


has evolved in a way that makes it suitable for space exploration – things like making sure we have detectors with very high detection efficiency, making sure we have detectors that can go into the near infrared and ultraviolet,’ he said. ‘If you are in space, it is generally quite expensive to collect signal, whether that’s collecting astronomy signal or anything else, so you do need to make sure the detector is really efficient.’


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