To detect exoplanets and study their formation and evolution, several exoplanet space missions, such as Kepler, TESS, GAIA, and CHEOPS, have been successfully developed and fully operated in space. However, China has not yet had its own exoplanet space mission. The Earth 2.0 (ET) space mission is being developed in China aiming at detecting and characterizing exoplanets, especially extra-terrestrial like planets. ET will carry six transit telescopes pointing to the same sky region and a gravitational microlensing telescope, with the goal of finding habitable Earth like planets (Earth 2.0s) around solar type stars and measure its occurrence rate. In order to detect Earth 2.0s, ultrahigh-precision photometry of ∼30 ppm is required, which places tight constrain on camera performance, such as high-speed readout, low readout noise, mosaic detectors, and radiation tolerance. As of now, a prototype camera utilizing a CCD250-82 detector from Teledyne e2v has been developed and its performance has been tested. At a readout rate of 2 M pixels/s, the readout noise of 10.96 e− RMS and the pixel response nonuniformity of 0.66% at 600 nm have been achieved. After receiving radiation doses of 5 krad (Si) and 13.43 krad (Si), the dark current of the CCD increased by 30% and 126%, respectively. The camera’s key performance meets the basic requirements for the ET space mission, except for its high cooling power consumption.
The study of the effect of γ-rays on the characteristic parameters of the HgCdTe Infrared Focal Plane Arrays (IRFPA) was carried out to address the problem of degradation of the characteristic parameters of IRFPA after irradiated by energetic particles in the space environment. The HgCdTe IRFPA was irradiated with 60Co γ-rays and annealed at 77K after irradiation. The dark current, responsivity, detectivity, and other characteristics of the IRFPA were compared before and after irradiation and annealing to summarize the changes of the IRFPA characteristics and to analyze the radiation effect mechanism of IRFPA. The experimental results show that as irradiation dose increases, the dark current decreases, and the responsivity decreases. After annealing at 77K, the degradation of the characteristic parameters caused by irradiation is restored. We believe that the effect of ionizing radiation leads to the decrease of Op-amp gain and threshold voltage drift of MOS, resulting in the degradation of the characteristic parameters.
A space mission called “Earth 2.0 (ET)” is being developed in China to address a few of fundamental questions in the exoplanet field: How frequently habitable Earth-like planets orbit solar type stars (Earth 2.0s)? How do terrestrial planets form and evolve? Where did floating planets come from? ET consists of six 30 cm diameter transit telescope systems with each field of view of 500 square degrees and one 35 cm diameter microlensing telescope with a field of view of 4 square degrees. The ET transit mode will monitor ~1.2M FGKM dwarfs in the original Kepler field and its neighboring fields continuously for four years while the microlensing mode monitors over 30M I< 20.6 stars in the Galactic bulge direction. ET will merge its photometry data with that from Kepler to increase the time baseline to 8 years. This enhances the transit signal-to-noise ratio, reduce false positives, and greatly increases the chance to discover Earth 2.0s. Simulations show that ET transit telescopes will be able to identify ~17 Earth 2.0s, about 4,900 Earth-sized terrestrial planets and about 29,000 new planets. In addition, ET will detect about 2,000 transit-timingvariation (TTV) planets and 700 of them will have mass and eccentricity measurements. The ET microlensing telescope will be able to identify over 1,000 microlensing planets. With simultaneous observations with the ground-based KMTNet telescopes, ET will be able to measure masses of over 300 microlensing planets and determine the mass distribution functions of free-floating planets and cold planets. ET will be operated at the Earth-Sun L2 orbit with a designed lifetime longer than 4 years.
Star sensor is an essential component of spacecraft attitude control system. Spatial radiation can cause star sensor performance degradation, abnormal work, attitude measurement accuracy and reliability reduction. Many studies have already been dedicated to the radiation effect on Charge-Coupled Device(CCD) image sensor, but fewer studies focus on the radiation effect of star sensor. The innovation of this paper is to study the radiation effects from the device level to the system level. The influence of the degradation of CCD image sensor radiation sensitive parameters on the performance parameters of star sensor is studied in this paper. The correlation among the radiation effect of proton, the non-uniformity noise of CCD image sensor and the performance parameter of star sensor is analyzed. This paper establishes a foundation for the study of error prediction and correction technology of star sensor on-orbit attitude measurement, and provides some theoretical basis for the design of high performance star sensor.
The radiation effects of protons will lead to degradation of dark signal of CCD. The degradation mechanism of dark signals of CCD are different due to the different proton energy. This paper investigated the radiation effects and annealing effects of CCD exposed to 3MeV and 10MeV proton. The test result shown that 3MeV proton irradiation induced CCD’s dark signal decreasing linearly following the proton fluence. The dark signal degradation induced by 10MeV was not linearly, due to the different defects introduced by proton with different energy. The results above indicates that the displacement damage behavior of defects introduced by 10MeV proton is more complex than 3MeV proton. There are more than two kinds of displacement damage defects dominating the increase of the dark signal. The results of this paper provided important reference for CCD’s proton radiation test method and evaluation technology.
Total ionizing dose effect is a major threat to space applications of CCD, which leads to the decrease of CCD saturation output voltage and the increase of dark signal. This paper investigated CCD and its readout circuit for experimental samples of different channel width to length ratio of MOSFET, and readout circuit amplifier, and CCD. The irradiation source was 60Co- gamma ray. through testing the parameters degradation of MOSFET and amplifier degradation, the generation and annealing law of irradiation induced defects in MOS single tube are analyzed. Combined with the radiation effect of amplifier and CCD, The correlation of radiation damage of the MOSFET and the readout circuit amplifier and CCD parameter degradation is established. Finally, this paper reveals the physical mechanism of ionizing radiation damage of the readout circuit. The research results provide a scientific basis for the selection of anti-radiation technology and structure optimization of domestic CCD.
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