WFC3 SMOV Proposal 11448: UVIS SAA Passage Behavior

We report on the behavior of the WFC3 UVIS CCDs through the Southern Atlantic Anomaly (SAA). A series of short, successive darks were acquired in three passages of the default SAA contour for WFC3, two along its inner edges and one through its centre. In the deepest part of the SAA, the dark current rate is ~73 e-/hour, a factor of ~45 greater than its non-SAA value. Correspondingly, a majority (~62%) of the pixels are impacted by CR hits and hot pixels. Based on the observations of this program, we find that at this time there is no need to modify the definition of the SAA contour for WFC3 UVIS observations.