As a part of the WASP system, these cameras are nominally fired every 4.7 seconds, in sync with the WaspTerrapix camera. They are sometimes run without the Terrapix camera in nighttime mapping flights where there is no visible imagery.

There are three Phoenix cameras used in WASP, manufactured by Indigo Systems, Inc., covering short-, mid-, and long-wave bands in the IR spectrum.

The cameras

• generate a 640 x 512 array of pixels
• 14 bits of precision per pixel
  • usually padded into 16 bit pixels when read from hardware
  • can easily be packed into 8 bit pixels, as we don't see anything like that dynamic range in practice

The ShortWave InfraRed camera (SWIR):

• 0.9 - 1.7 µm
• InGaAs detector array

The MidWave InfraRed camera (MWIR):

• 3.0 - 5.0 µm
• InSb detector array

The LongWave InfraRed camera (LWIR):

• 8.0 - 9.2 µm
• QWIP (quantum-well photodetector) array