Questions_and_Answers_for_N00173-18-R-SA01.docx

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS FOR N00173-18-R-SA01

MINIMUM SPECIFICATION #7 .

QUESTION: Can you give us a better description of what you require for an electromechanical iris shutter and also the capping shutter?"

RESPONSE: The electromechanical iris and capping shutter provide a remotely triggered mechanical aperture that opens to a user-adjustable size in order to control the amount of light entering the camera and reaching each frame. The shutter should operate in two modes: a triggered mode where a TTL input should be used to trigger the opening of the shutter for an exposure time on the order of 50 ms, and an alignment mode where the shutter can be held open indefinitely. In the triggered mode, the opening of the shutter provides only coarse control of the exposure time; fine control is achieved by triggering of the ICCDs. For a given set of measurements, the size of the opening in the iris may be set manually beforehand by the user and need not be adjustable between frames or by software. For framing camera imaging of fast, transient plasmas, the electromechanical iris and capping shutter primarily function to provide easy adjustment of the camera aperture and to reduce the unnecessary exposure of the ICCDs to light long before or long after the desired images are recorded. Other methods for achieving these functions may be proposed.