AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006
Session 115 JWST
Poster, Wednesday, 9:20am-6:30pm, January 11, 2006, Exhibit Hall

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[115.11] Detectors for the NIRCAM Instrument on JWST

E.T. Young, M.J. Rieke (University of Arizona), D.N.B. Hall (University of Hawaii), J. Garnett, M. Loose (Rockwell Scientific), A. Magoncelli (Lockheed-Martin ATC), G. Winters (University of Arizona)

NIRCAM is the near infrared camera for the James Webb Space Telescope. It will provide an unprecedented combination of sensitivity, wide field of view, and angular resolution between the wavelengths of 0.6 to 5 \mu m. To cover this wide range, the instrument uses two versions of the Rockwell Scientific HgCdTe HAWAII-2RG detector technology. The short wavelength channel consists of a 2 x 2 mosaic of 2.5 \mu m cutoff detectors, producing a 4096 x 4096 array. The mid-wavelength channel consists of a single 2048x2048 5 \mu m cutoff array. For redundancy and areal coverage, the instrument has two copies of each of these channels, yielding a total of 40 megapixels on the sky.

The focal plane array effort includes detector and cryogenic electronics development at Rockwell Scientific, detector packaging at the University of Arizona, and electronics development at Lockheed-Martin Advanced Technology Center. We report on the current status in all these areas. We present data that indicate the NIRCAM detectors will meet the performance goals of JWST. We also discuss testing plans for the next few months that will bring the focal plane arrays to flight technical readiness.

The NIRCAM instrument is funded by NASA/GSFC under contract NAS5-02105.


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