Goggle combines night vision, thermal sight - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Goggle combines night vision, thermal sight

The Army is fielding a more versatile night-vision goggle designed to help soldiers see more clearly inside the darkest caves or in the shadows of brightly lit city blocks.

The helmet-mounted Enhanced Night Vision Goggle fuses the best parts of the Army’s current-issue NVG and lightweight thermal sight into a compact device, Program Executive Office Soldier officials say.

“I think it is going to be a dramatic improvement in situational awareness,” said Lt. Col. Joseph Capobianco, product manager for Soldier Sensors and Lasers.

The AN/PSQ-20 ENVG will work “in any environment where you have absolutely no starlight,” he said, such as a cave, an overcast night or “types of obscurations” such as smoke or dust storms.

It does this by allowing the soldier to use the image intensification of an NVG and the heat-sensing, forward-looking infrared of a thermal imager at the same time.

“You blend them based on how dark it is outside or where you are — if you are in a city, if you are in the desert or a tunnel complex, you optimize it to get a better picture,” Capobianco said.

The technology advancement performs essentially the same mission as the current issue PVS14 NVG and the AN/PAS13 Light Weapon Thermal Sight, and weighs about a pound less than both systems combined.

So far, the Army has fielded about 200 new ENVGs, and it is scheduled to field them to the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y., in late February.

PEO Soldier officials would not say how many ENVGs they intend to buy. The Army awarded a contract to ITT Industries Night Vision in April 2005, potentially worth $560 million.

“The cost is more than an individual system, but it is less than buying both” a night vision goggle and a thermal imager, Capobianco said.

The ENVG, which includes a new helmet mount and four AA batteries in a separate pack, weighs about 2 pounds.

The PVS14, which runs on a AA battery, weighs 1.25 pounds. Selected soldiers also carry the AN/PAS13, which runs on four lithium AAs and weighs 1.9 pounds.

Army equipment officials maintain the new ENVG will not replace every PVS14, which “is state-of-the-art night vision,” Capobianco said. “No one else in the world has that caliber of night-vision capability.”

Instead, the ENVG will go to soldiers in leadership positions in brigade combat teams.

“It’s going to go to those leaders in the BCTs — squad leaders, team leaders, platoon leaders — because it will give them greater situational awareness,” Capobianco said.

Like the current PVS14, the ENVG mounts on the front of the helmet, but the separate battery pack mounts on the back, making it more ergonomic, Capobianco said.

“It just balances that weight on your head,” he said.

The four AAs needed to power the ENVG provide 15 hours of use time — that’s 7.5 hours of image-intensifying technology combined with the thermal capability and 7.5 hours of straight image intensification.

The PVS14 runs for about 15 hours on a single AA and the AN/PAS13 runs for about five hours on its four lithium AA batteries.

The thermal portion of the ENVG has three modes that show either the outline of a person, only the exposed heat sources such as the face, or the entire heat signature. It can also be operated in white thermal for nighttime or black thermal for daytime use. Black thermal makes all heat sources appear black.

It takes about a day’s worth of training for most soldiers to become comfortable with the ENVG, said Maj. Theo Kang of the ENVG program under Soldier Sensors and Lasers.

“Soldiers have either used night vision or thermal or both, so the learning curve is pretty rapid,” Kang said.

The training involves some classroom and hands-on practice to get comfortable with using both technologies together.

“In certain ambient conditions; if you’ve got good illumination, you would want more [image intensification], but if you were in a daylight situation or in a tunnel, where you have no ambient light whatsoever, then you would lean more toward the thermal,” Capobianco said.

Another environment that challenges NVGs is urban areas where soldiers can find themselves moving quickly from a dark area to a street that’s heavily lit, Kang said. This tends to wash out night vision and makes it difficult to see into the shadows.

“This system allows you to overcome those old shortcomings of standard NVGs,” he said.

As with all new equipment, soldiers will find new ways to become more effective with the ENVG simply by using it, Capobianco said.

“It always amazes me what happens when you give the kit to the operational guys … they are going to spend hours on this thing figuring out how they can use it,” he said. “They are going to do things with it that I haven’t even thought about.”