Local lab takes night vision a step further

Night vision goggles work well when it comes to finding an enemy at night, but today’s military has something that goes a step farther — a hand-held infrared device that can track a person’s movements in total darkness, even after he’s no longer there.

It’s the latest whiz-bang, high-tech gadget to emerge from the labs at Charleston’s Naval Weapons Station.

The new device gives a soldier an obvious advantage in combat. It’s something that one of its developers, retired Navy Capt. Stephen Jarrett, hopes will become commonplace for all GIs who need it in the ongoing war on terrorism.

Jarrett is a senior engineer for advanced technology development at the Navy’s SPAWAR Center at the weapons station. His job is to link the military and other federal agencies with the newest technology that American industry can offer.

“I have three sons of my own,” Jarrett said this week as he demonstrated the device. “They’re 24, 20, and 16. It just breaks my heart seeing a 19-year-old soldier getting shot (in Afghanistan or Iraq) because he entered a cave and flicked on a flashlight.”

Jarrett figures if the soldier had been carrying the infrared device, he wouldn’t have needed a flashlight.

Jarrett, who deals in advanced sensors, helped find the military market for the device, known as the Micro Infrared Camera Pocketscope when it went into production last year. Built by Raytheon Commercial Infrared of Dallas, the device, now renamed the X100, sees and displays heat, not light.

To do this, the X100 uses an amorphous silicon detector, or sensor, and a tiny computer that converts heat into an image. The device can be hooked to a computer monitor that displays the images, or the operator can simply look through the eyepiece.

Sensitivity is a big plus. The device can pick up a target, or a heat source, that’s no more than .0057 of a degree warmer than whatever else is nearby. That means if a man leans against a wall or sits on the floor of a darkened room for awhile, the X100 can detect his image or his footprints for up to 30 minutes after he’s moved somewhere else.

Jarrett said the X100 was originally a project that emerged from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is the central research and development organization for the U.S. Department of Defense. It spent about $4.5 million developing the device.

When Jarrett began hooking the device up with the military, he had three goals in mind: “Keep it small, make sure it works on small batteries, and get the price down.”

He also made sure it was rugged enough to carry in combat.

The price, he said, is just under $6,000 per unit, but it was the X100’s capabilities that caught the Army’s attention.

The Army first asked for 70 of them shortly before the invasion of Iraq, he said. “We filled that order in 48 hours. Then they asked for 325 more. They arrived within three weeks.”

Raytheon spokeswoman Patricia Perlini said Raytheon has sold about 500 of the devices, including the nearly 400 units ordered by the Army. The remainder have gone to federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Border Patrol.

“We thought the Border Patrol would want them to keep watch on people sneaking into the country,” Jarrett said. “But the Border Patrol soon realized they could scan a car and look for heat-emitting handprints. Wherever they found a lot of handprints, they knew to look for drugs or other hidden items.”

Jarrett said he realizes it’s safe to assume that an enemy will always acquire whatever the nation’s edge in technology can produce. The answer, he said, is to develop something newer.

The next step, for example, could be a fusion of acoustics and thermal imaging. Such devices could be operated from a remote site. The operator could be alerted to an intruder first by what can be heard, then by what can be seen, all in total darkness.

In the meantime, the Coast Guard could be the X100’s next customer.

“If an intruder is swimming toward you, you can pick up his image in the water,” Jarrett said.