Astrophysics Seminar
CMOS Detectors for NASA's next Flagship Mission; Habitable Worlds Observatory
Speaker: Dr. Angaraj Duara (Open University, Milton Keynes, UK)
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will be the next NASA flagship mission, as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope. With a planned launch in 2040, HWO's primary objective would be the search for life, by identifying habitable, Earth-like planets, outside our solar system. Funded by the UK Space Agency (UKSA), CEI is currently working on the CMOS detectors for their UV-Vis application on the NASA HWO spacecraft. Due to the short absorption length, UV photons are predominantly absorbed by the dead layer in the first few nanometres of a silicon device.
Specialised UV enhancement technologies are therefore needed to attain a good quantum efficiency (QE) in the UV band. A test program of different UV coatings and enhancement technologies, including the 2D-doping technique from NASA/JPL, has been performed at CEI to evaluate how these compare on a range of electro-optical and manufacturing parameters. This includes UV QE results from 120nm-400nm.
Prior to this, Angaraj worked on CMOS detectors for the CASTOR Space Telescope. The Cosmological Advanced Survey Telescope for Optical and UV Research (CASTOR) is a proposed space telescope mission led by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), along with an international team comprising of NASA, UK Space Agency and various research institutes. Angaraj did his PhD from the University of Leicester UK, on SiPM detectors for their application in the largest ground-based gamma ray observatory; The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). He graduated with a 1st class honours in MPhys. Physics with Astrophysics from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester UK.