ECAM-C50 (WFOV)

The ECAM Imaging System minimizes spacecraft overhead and flexibly delivers the features, performance, and reliability required to service a variety of applications, including: (1) In-flight engineering diagnostics. (2) Deployment/actuator monitoring. (3) Space situational awareness. (4) Science observations. (5) Public outreach.

Leveraging the experience of more than a dozen science instruments delivered to deep space that have returned more than 700,000 images, the ECAM imaging system delivers cost-effective, short lead-time, high-performance, and reliable space imaging as a modular off-the-shelf solution.

The C50 utilizes a CMOS image sensor with integral RGB Bayer Pattern color filter array. The sensor outputs 10-bit pixels that are square-root companded to 8-bits before being transmitted to the DVR on a 200 Mbit/s serial link. Within the DVR, video is preprocessed and compressed in real-time, then buffered to memory for playback at a later time. Preprocessing typically includes Bayer Pattern interpolation and direct conversion to the YCbCr color space using a 5 x 5 filter kernel. The video is also reformatted as needed for input to either a JPEG (lossy) or Huffman First Difference (lossless) compressor.

The C50 is highly configurable. The exposure and gain may be adjusted to support widely varying scene conditions and the DVR supports automatic gain and exposure control.