Next Generation Space Telescope: NIR InSb Array Development

ABSTRACT The astronomical community has benefited from the scientific advances in photo-detection over the last few decades, from optical CCDs to infrared array detectors, for both large ground-based telescopes and space-borne telescopes. NGST, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, will draw on the improvements in infrared array technologies to achieve its goals and mission. The University of Rochester, in collaboration with Raytheon and NASA Ames Research Center, is developing and testing near infrared InSb array detectors to meet the stringent requirements for NGST. The latest development involves a suitable multiplexer in a 2048×2048 format that will be bump-bonded to an InSb array. Twenty of these arrays will be required for NGST imaging and spectroscopy. We present results for pathfinder 1024 × 1024 arrays. This is a companion work to the paper in these SPIE proceedings b