Birth of the Blue Missile

What are you using the IR illuminators for? You must be using standard IR sensitive cameras as well or is there some benifit to using active IR illumination with thermal imaging? Flir are typically cooled or uncooled microbolometer or cooled MCT and use rare element lensing, very different from a CCD imager. All the various ranger and similar PTZ and the hand held flirs I used had nothing to do with active IR illumination. Just curious :) Quite an amazing spaceship vehicle you are building.