Good night vision is a must-have for any astronomer hoping to choose one star out of a galaxy brimming with hundreds of millions burning gas balls. That goes for their equipment too, and a group of researchers are hoping their new infrared detector will not only improve telescope vision, but lower the cost, too.

The detector, a chip known as a Quantum Well Infrared Photodetector array (QWIP), is the largest of its kind, capable of resolving images in far infrared wavelengths more than three times better than its counterparts in use today.

"It's sort of a milestone for us to get to this level," said Murzy Jhabvala, chief engineer of NASA's Instrument Systems and Technology Center, where the chip was developed. The center is part of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Most infrared detectors use a semiconductor material called mercury cadmium telluride to absorb incoming light and translate it into images. While highly effective, the material is expensive to make and difficult to control during development, QWIP researchers said. The mercury approach also requires its own manufacturing infrastructure that can drive up the cost of each chip.

The new QWIP array, however, uses the semiconductor gallium arsenide, a material with established commercial uses that have led to a simplified, less expensive, manufacturing process.

"The same materials we use in this detector are common to those in other microelectronics," said Arnie Goldberg, a physicist with the Army Research Lab in Adelphi, Maryland who - along with researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Rockwell Science Center - helped develop the new QWIP. "Cell phones, for example, use the very same materials we are, in a different structure of course."

The best detectors in use today -- including other gallium arsenide versions -- have a resolving power of about 300,000 pixels, meaning they carry that many cells to detect incoming infrared light. The new array, a wafer-like chip measuring about 2 centimeters on a side, carries 1 million pixels across its detection surface. Even the pixels themselves are smaller, five of them could fit in the diameter of a human hair, allowing them to detect more light and generate a higher quality image.

Jhabvala said the new array is capable of detecting light over a broad range of the infrared spectrum, with wavelengths of about 8 to 10 microns. In general, QWIP technology can produce detectors sensitive to between 3 and 18 microns.

As light comes into the detector, it passes over corrugations on each pixel that scatters the spectrum so it can be absorbed. The array then converts the light into an electric current that passes to an attached circuit and translates the signal into a computer image.

Despite its increase resolution and power, the new QWIP still has a few bugs to work out, Goldberg said.

Just running the array can ruin readings since heat from its operation can interfere with its detection capability. To beat this, QWIP researchers have to keep the infrared detector much cooler than its counterparts, usually around -200 degrees Celsius. The array also isn't as sensitive when detecting light as other QWIPs are, requiring longer periods to compile images than those in use today.

"For most applications, though, you shouldn't see a difference," Goldberg said. "Instead of having to wait a tenth of a millisecond for an image, you'd have to wait one whole millisecond."

But even the slightest advance in night vision can give soldiers the edge on the battlefield, a notion not lost on the US military, which has used infrared goggles for the last 30 years. Soldiers typical view the nighttime environment at wavelengths between eight and 12 microns on the electromagnetic spectrum. The region is where room temperature objects, like people for instance, emit most of their light.

"At night, even with no moonlight, the world is glowing," Goldberg said.

The US Armed Forces were drawn to the new QWIP project because of the potential to cut back on spending. Most military night vision goggles rely on the expensive mercury cadmium telluride semiconductors. According to Goldberg, the militaries of Germany and Sweden have already adopted lower resolution gallium arsenide chips into their infrared systems because of the lower cost. But the sensitivity issue of the new QWIP is enough to keep it from replacing US military infrared detectors. Still, military officials remain interested in alternative uses of the technology.

"They were actually using these QWIPs to see if they could detect where land mines had recently been laid," Jhabvala said, adding that he expects the new chip to be ready for mass use in the next two years.

The new QWIP detector has also drawn much attention for its possible civilian uses, as well.

Jhabvala said energy officials in South America contacted him with the hope that the new QWIP track down breaks in the 3,000 miles of power lines that traverse the Amazon rain forest. A build up in heat, spotted from airplane-mounted infrared camera, could help repairmen find a broken transformer relay.

The resolution power of the detector could help scientists track temperature changes in the atmosphere, monitor the pollution emissions of industrial smokestacks and maybe even provide the groundwork necessary for an earthquake early warning system.

"Satellite imaging has shown that just before a major earthquake, ground temperatures in the area are 2 to 4 degrees hotter than the surrounding air," said Friedemann Freund, a NASA Ames Research Center physicist. Freund used the new QWIP to track the thermal changes in rock as it was crushed together. "These temperature changes come and go very rapidly, and occur within days or hours of a quake."

While the actual cause of the thermal variations are as yet unexplained, if they are due to the stress and deformation of rock before an earthquake, then a 1 million-pixel QWIP aboard a satellite would be able track the phenomena much better than the weather satellites that a used today.