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Sensor system and method for the panoramic standoff detection of chemical contaminants on terrestrial surfaces

  • US 9,322,768 B1
  • Filed: 03/12/2013
  • Issued: 04/26/2016
  • Est. Priority Date: 03/12/2013
  • Status: Active Grant
First Claim
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1. A chemical imaging sensor for detecting and imaging chemical contaminants comprising analytes, said sensor comprising:

  • a first component that performs irradiative transient heating;

    a second component that performs temperature nonequilibrium thermal luminescence spectroscopy, said second component comprising a spectroradiometer receiver, wherein said spectroradiometer receiver includes a collector optic component group comprising a plurality of hyperboloid mirrors, a Schwarzschild objective collimator optics component group comprising a plurality of spherical mirrors, and a stress-solid-state interferometer comprising front and back linear polarizers sandwiching a virtual stack phased-array (VSPA) bar photoelastic modulator (PEM), wherein said VSPA bar PEM comprises a single stress-birefringence ZnSe crystal having an array of ultrasonic-frequency piezoelectric transducers (PZTs) bonded across a length of the crystal, and wherein said VSPA bar PEM is activated by the PZTs generating interferograms at ultrahigh-speed on collimated panoramic field-of-view light incoming from said Schwarzschild objective collimator optics component group collected by said collector optic component group;

    a third component that performs differential hyperspectral imaging; and

    a fourth component that performs artificial neural networking,wherein the first, second, third, and fourth components combine to measure and process a dynamic pattern of absorptive-emissive middle infrared molecular signature spectra of said analytes.

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