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M.M. Freund, S.H. Moseley, C.A. Allen, R.A. Shafer, G.M. Voellmer (NASA/GSFC), J. Staguhn (Raytheon ITSS & NASA/GSFC), D.A. Harper (U. of Chicago), D. Dowell, T. Phillips (Caltech)
The HAWC instrument on SOFIA is diffraction limited in four bands between 50-220\micron, with background limited sensitivity. Its purpose is to provide sensitive and reliable facility-imaging capabilities for SOFIA during its first operational years. It is the first flight instrument to use a state of the art bolometric 12x32 pixel array of ion implanted silicon PUDs, a closed-packed 2D array with >95% filling factor. It will be cooled to ~0.2K, using an Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator (ADR). Here we report on detector characteristics: Measured I/V curves for different temperatures are completely consistent with a four parameter bolometer model. The measured detector noise contribution to the measured noise is only ~1-2% of the sky background noise.
In September, 2000 a prototype instrument operating at \lambda=350\micron using a single linear array of detectors was successfully deployed, and saw first light on the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) on Mauna Kea.