Teledyne HgCdTe Sensor on Repaired Hubble Telescope

Yahoo: Teledyne Scientific & Imaging (TS&I) has delivered a new type of infrared imaging sensor for the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) installed on Hubble Space Telescope during Servicing Mission 4.

Nearly all of the iconic Hubble images have been taken with CCDs that are primarily sensitive to visible light. Until now, IR imaging has been constrained by the small 256x256 pixel detectors of the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) instrument, which were state-of-the-art when NICMOS was installed in the HST in 1997. Teledyne’s 1024x1024 pixel HgCdTe IR sensor in WFC3 provides a significant increase in the number of IR pixels and also has higher QE, lower readout noise, and lower dark current. Combined with the high efficiency of the WFC3 optics, the IR imager of WFC3 provides up to 30 times increase in discovery efficiency in the near IR spectrum.