Computer Science – Performance
Scientific paper
Jan 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21546410a&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #464.10; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.500
Computer Science
Performance
Scientific paper
The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), installed in May 2009 into the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), was designed with two low noise, photon counting detectors. The FUV channel utilizes a windowless, cross delay line (XDL) microchannel plate detector, with heritage from the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) mission. The NUV side employs a closed tube MAMA detector, which had been the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) flight spare. The background performance of both channels was measured during the COS Servicing Mission Observatory Verification (SMOV) program. For the FUV detector, the background rate is as expected from prelaunch estimates, 2.4×10-6 counts/sec/pixel, except at times when HST is close to the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA). Close to the SAA boundary, the rate can be as high as 8×10-5. Several weak structures are found in the dark exposures. Some of these are likely due to energetic particles trapped in the geomagnetic field and can be recognized by their large pulse heights. Others are low gain events. For TIME-TAG exposures, most features are removed in ground processing by pulse height filtering of the individual events. For ACCUM mode, which is only used for bright objects, suspect regions of the spectra will be marked by data quality flags, but the features are expected to be too weak to be of consequence. For the NUV detector, the background rate is 6.7×10-5 counts/sec/pixel, about three times lower than predicted from prelaunch estimates and about 15 times lower than the pre-Servicing Mission 4 performance of the STIS NUV detector. A difference in windows between the MAMAs accounts for much of the improvement. In particular, although the COS background is elevated near the SAA, up to 1×10-3 counts/sec/pixel, no long-term phosphorescence occurs in the window after HST passes through the SAA. Little structure is seen in the NUV darks.
Ake Thomas B. III
COS IDT Team
Keyes Charles
McPhate Jason
Osterman Steve
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