Abstract: A bomb damage assessment system that is carried by a weapon and released to provide imagery of a bombed area before and after bomb delivery. The system comprises a glider that is releasably secured to the weapon that includes tracking and guidance electronics for programmably controlling the flight thereof. An imaging system is disposed in the front end of the glider and a deployable ballute is disposed at the rear end thereof. A data link is provided for transmitting images to a command center for review. The system provides imagery of a target area before, during and after weapon impact. Television or infrared cameras may be used for day or night missions. As a target area is approached, the glider is released, is decelerated by the ballute, wings are unfolded, and the ballute is released, resulting in an aerodynamic vehicle that flies much slower than the weapon. The imaging system tracks the weapon to impact. The explosion of the weapon produces a hot spot that is tracked by the imaging system.

Abstract: A self-calibration technique which provides detector responsivity normalization for a charge-coupled device, hereinafter referred to as CCD, area imager. The CCD area imager is designed such that the detectors can be electrically decoupled from CCD multiplex register inputs. Calibration reference and gain normalization are provided by a pulsed light source and an analog divider circuit. This technique is applicable to both CCD visible imagers which are fabricated on an intrinsic semiconductor substrate and CCD infrared imagers which can be fabricated on an extrinsic or intrinsic substrate. The technique is applied to a visible imager for illustration of its self-calibration capability.

Abstract: A time change or moving target indication system utilizing charge-coupled devices (CCD's) for signal processing in which successive integrated samples from individual detectors are loaded into adjacent CCD storage buckets and then clocked to an output device. The output device is any suitable differencing arrangement which samples the charge stored in adjacent buckets and gives an output proportional to the difference. The system of the invention allows the successive signals from individual detectors to pass through virtually identical elements in the signal processing chain so as to reduce the effects of transfer inefficiency on the accuracy of the MTI subtraction process. Further, the signal spectrum from an individual detector output may be shifted to higher frequencies during the readout process so as to reduce the effects of any 1/f noise that may be present in the output device.