Hume Seminar Series: Designing and Qualifying High-Precision Focal Plane Arrays for Dynamic Radiation Space Mission Environments

About the Event:

Join us tonight to learn about the success of VT NSI NASA-funded “H-TIDeS” program that focused on development of an ultraviolet EMCCD space instrument. This technology development expands on the capabilities of current generation rocket instruments led by Space@VT’s Scott Bailey in support of Heliophysics campaigns and aims to bring EMCCD capabilities to low Earth orbit. Leon Harding will expand on the architecture of EMCCDs, and how the space environment can degrade their charge transfer efficiency in unique ways as a result of damage from high-energy particles such as protons, electrons, and cosmic rays. He will report on a recently completed detector proton irradiation campaign for the above H-TIDeS program and will discuss the ongoing validation phase led by AOE’s Samantha Kenyon in the Small Satellite Payload Lab (SSPL).

About the Speaker:

Mr. Leon Harding, a senior mission architect at Northrop Grumman.

He serves as a lead systems engineer and architect across space mission development and implementation. Prior to joining Northrop Grumman in 2023, he was a research associate professor in the Virginia Tech National Security Institute and was assistant director of the Mission Systems Division. As a principal investigator, his VT programs focused on end-to-end space system development, from concept through validation.

Before VT, he was a technologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a postdoctoral scholar of astronomy at Caltech. He currently serves as the deputy lead systems engineer for a NASA Earth Systems Explorer space mission – STRIVE – which has progressed to Phase B this year.