AES Corporation announced this week that their Technical Services (TSS) Division was recently awarded a contract from the U.S. Army to help provide them with a new CCTV system that could withstand temperatures up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

According to Aaron Tesnow, director of business development for TSS, the CCTV system is being used by the Army to record testing of objects in extreme heat at their lab in Natick, Mass.

"They actually tests textiles for the military, the skin of vehicles like Humvee skin, and military clothing, the uniforms of the soldiers, tents, tarps, and those kinds of things. What they do is… they put the stuff in a test area and they blow it up or incinerate it and our cameras are in there to watch and give the scientists a good view of what’s happening to those items," he said.

Tesnow added that the Army initially wanted a pan-tilt zoom camera that would be able to withstand those temperatures, but because pan-tilt cameras have moving parts that would be destroyed in such extreme heat, the company had to bring in different manufacturers to work together to build a camera system that could meet the Army’s specifications.

"You couldn’t go to Pelco, you couldn’t go to Extreme (CCTV), and you couldn’t go to anyone and buy one singular system that worked for this. So we’ve got a camera, a housing, a liquid cooled system, and actually the software that’s running it, all coming from different manufacturers," he said.