James Webb Space Telescope suffers pixel problem
MAR 03, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.025103
New Scientist : The James Webb Space Telescope is suffering yet another setback—a team at the University of Arizona in Tucson found in December that about 2% of pixels in a detector destined for JWST‘s Near Infrared Camera were transmitting signals although no light was hitting them. That’s four times as many “hot pixels” as there were when the detector was analyzed in 2008. The researchers later found that the problem affects four of the camera’s five long-wavelength detector arrays. NASA allows no more than 5% of a detector’s pixels to be hot by the end of the telescope’s five-year space mission. At this rate, the detectors may exceed this limit before the telescope even leaves the ground.
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
