The NICI project is our most ambitious to date. It was designed from the start to be narrowly focussed on imaging Jupiter class planets orbitting around other stars. This required an adaptive optics front-end to reduce scatter from our atmosphere and the telescopes followed by a very low scatter dual channel coronagraphic infrared camera. The two channels are used to image the candidate star in and out of the methane absorption band so that the images can be differenced to cancel the residual scattered light that the coronagraph cannot block. Apodized occulting masks have produced a best ever contrast for this type of work of about 15 magnitudes at 1 arcsecond. It is presently being used on a long term planet finding campaign by a University of Hawaii team of scientists. This project has already produced two planet results.

ASTROCAM is specifically designed for the measurement of star position or astrometry. It is a one to one offner imager with two large filter wheels and a pupil imager. The offner optical relay was selected for its very low distortion and long term stability. It uses a 1024 x 1024 In:Sb Aladdin array. ASTROCAM was built for the Naval Observatory and NRL. The camera is deployed on the 1.5 meter Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

NAC - Camera for the National Solar Observatory

This project built a 1024 x 1024 imaging camera for studies of our sun. This project pushed the readout rate. We were able to achieve 6 Hz full frame rate to disk and inplemented multiple coadd buffers and hardware triggering to achieve tight coordination with a fast polarization mechanism.

CoCo: A cold coronagraphic camera

Built for JPL, CoCo was designed to explore coronagraphic observations in the infrared spectrum and has produced some interesting results. CoCo operates in the wavelengths from 1 to 5 microns and is used with NSFCAM at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF).

ETD: A dual beam 1 - 5 micron camera

MKIR designed and built the cryostat for this dual beam imager that uses two 256x256 In:Sb arrays. The camera was built for the Harvard Smithsonian. This camera had very low weight and size budgets. A CTI model 22 cooler was used with two passive floating shields resulting in a very efficient cryostat. Particular car was placed on making the system easy to work on.

Redeye I & Redeye II: NICMOS cameras

The Redeyes are two nearly identical 256x256 NICMOS cameras built for CFHT. MKIR built the cryostats around the CFHT designed optics and controller.

three generations of cryostats built for lab tests at JPL of long wavelength (100 micron) photoconductors to be usedin a varitety of space telescope applications. These are 2 can liquid nitrogen and liquid helium dewars. LTD II has a blind cavity in the liquid helium can with a solid state black body inside that allows testing with background temperatures of around 1.5 degrees Kelvin.

MOP: Multichannel Occultation Photometer

MOP is a Multichannel Occultation Photometer for observing the Io/Europa series of occultations to study Io volcanism.  MOP has a four channel photometer with 1-5 and 10 micron detectors in each chopped beam with 4 detectors total.  This instrument was built for JPL.