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Reflections on the Development of the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer(ACIS)

gordon garmire, Penn State University

The ACIS began as a collaboration between JPL, MIT and Penn State University in the early 1980's, with JPL taking a lead role in the development of the CCDs through industrial contractors, principally Texas Instruments. As the program developed, JPL's interested in High Energy began to be secondary to their planetary missions and the primary responsibility for developing the CCDs and the instrument design shifted to Penn State, MIT Center for Space Research and MITs Lincoln Laboratory. I will show how the design of the instrument evolved from the original proposal with 24 CCDs plus an optional set of six CCDs for grating spectroscopy to its current design of two arrays, one optimized for imaging and one optimized for grating spectroscopy.