Development of low cost CCD camera for microsatellites

The microsatellite has many advantages, such as shorter development cycle, higher mobility and lower cost than those of conventional satellites. It becomes a hot area of the remote sensing. The developing CCD camera is one of the most important payloads of the microsatellite and it has 0.98/0.5 year reliability rate at a low cost. The optical system adopts catadioptric structure with wide working temperature range and uses spherical-surfaces components which are fabricated and assembled easily. Stray light reduction and environmental adaptation design can further improve imaging capability of the system. The electric circuit system applies many new technologies such as frame transfer CCD, field programmable gate array (FPGA), correlated double sampling (CDS), low-voltage differential transferring (LVDS) and buck/boost voltage conversion, so the system has low cost, low power consumption and good stability. The commercial-off-the-sheft (COTS) components are screened by destructive physical analysis (DPA), additional screening, boarding tests and so on. The reasonable reliability methods are used in the developing process of the CCD camera. The CCD camera maintains good imaging performance in the environmental tests, calibration experiment and imaging capability tests.