What is the performance of the JWST detectors?
The HgCdTe detectors for JWST’s three short wavelength instruments were under development early in the Project’s history. The 2.5-micron cutoff detectors for the short wavelength arm of NIRCam have always met the performance requirements while some tailoring of Teledyne’s processes was required to meet the dark current requirement for the 5-micron cutoff detectors. The recent issues hindering completion of the flight detector fabrication have not been the result of poor performance of the detectors but rather several production problems such as one which caused a number of dead pixels around the edges of an array. All of these problems have now been solved. The MIRI detectors build on the heritage from the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on Spitzer, but with significant performance enhancements such as the 1024 by 1024 pixel format, a lower read noise, and modifications in the detector prescription for better performance in the 5 to 10 micron range. Excellent detector arrays have been pro
