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arXiv · 2608.09862

A bestiary of low-level electrical artifacts in SPHEREx flight data

Candice M. Fazar·Michael Zemcov·C. Darren Dowell·Brendan P. Crill·Chi Nguyen·Howard Hui
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Abstract

SPHEREx, NASA's all-sky spectrophotometric survey mission, maps the sky in 102 spectral channels from 0.75 um to 5.0 um at 6.15'' resolution from low-Earth orbit using a custom readout of six HAWAII-2RG detectors. The SPHEREx instrument team and Science Data Center have built a robust science data pipeline that includes mitigating image-space artifacts arising from low-level optical and electronic effects. Analysis of first-survey flight data has confirmed predictions for some of these effects, determined differences between the laboratory and flight predictions in others, and even found new artifacts that were unanticipated. This paper will summarize our current understanding of artifacts in SPHEREx images, including image-space artifacts resulting from cosmic rays, crosstalk and unresponsive pixels. We also present mitigation and/or masking strategies implemented to mitigate such effects, and an assessment of the possible implications for other space missions using HAWAII-2RG detectors.

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Candice M. Fazar, Michael Zemcov, C. Darren Dowell, Brendan P. Crill, Chi Nguyen, Howard Hui. 2026-08-10. A bestiary of low-level electrical artifacts in SPHEREx flight data. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3103794

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