NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., intends to award a sole-source contract to Teledyne Scientific & Imaging of Camarillo, Calif., for a dozen sensor chip assemblies for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) project, according to a Nov. 16 announcement on the Federal Business Opportunities procurement website.
NASA is looking at two mission concepts for WFIRST, a proposed infrared space observatory that ranked first in the National Research Council’s most recent decadal survey of the science community’s astronomy and astrophysics priorities.
Both concepts are based on test results from a detector module subassembly built for the Joint Dark Energy Mission, a since-abandoned NASA undertaking with the U.S. Department of Energy that served as the basis for WFIRST concept.
NASA wants to buy 12 additional sensor chip assemblies — specifically, the H4RG-10 — from Teledyne Scientific & Imaging for Goddard’s Detector Characterization Laboratory to use for testing and to be incorporated into a focal plane assembly for a WFIRST engineering development unit. NASA would expect delivery of the sensor chip assemblies within 36 months of contract.