New Horizons 'Ralph' charge coupled device
- Made:
- c. 2006
A charge coupled device (CCD) used in the Ralph telescope of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.
This charge coupled device was a part of ‘Ralph’, the probe imaging tool aboard the New Horizons spacecraft launched in 2006. Ralph was responsible for capturing images of Pluto, which was of interest to scientists as they sought to understand similarities between Pluto’s moons and ours.
Notably, this imaging tool operates more like a scanner than a camera. In the case of Ralph, the CCD’s works through Time Delay Integration in which a line of CCD pixels continuously passes an object, building a gradual image of it.
Details
- Category:
- Space Technology
- Object Number:
- L2007-4042
- Materials:
- metal (unknown), silicon, copper (metal) and glass
- type:
- spacecraft, detectors and charge coupled devices (ccds)
- credit:
- Teledyne Technologies
