Joel D. Offenberg, Ratnabali Sengupta, Dale Fixsen (Raytheon STX ), H.S. (Peter) Stockman, Scott Stallcup, Maria A. Nieto-Santisteban (Space Telescope Science Institute)
Reference URL: http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/iptsprodpage?Id=14
The Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) will perform wide-field near-IR imaging in the high-radiation environment of deep space. Outside any protective magnetic fields, cosmic rays will produce many charged-particle events on the imaging detector, affecting as much as 10% of the field-of-view during a baseline 1000-second observation. We present an algorithm that identifies cosmic ray events in a series of non-destructive readouts during an observation. Test results, in which over 99% of the cosmic rays are identified and removed without significant damage to the underlying data, are also presented.