Testing Of Space Telescope 512-Channel Digicon

The Space Telescope Digicons are extremely powerful detectors, each one consisting of 512 parallel photon-counting channels. During testing, each channel of each Digicon must be characterized as to its photon-counting and noise characteristics, resulting in a tre-mendous volume of data. Furthermore, tests must be made at the component and subassembly level to screen parts not suitable for further processing. Adding to this testing task are the additional requirements that the tubes must be tested at high voltage without encapsulation, they must be kept scrupulously clean, and, in some cases, they must be tested in the vacuum ultraviolet portion of the spectrum. This paper describes the design and use of a unique, accurate and efficient test facility now in operation at EVC. Many of the tests are run by computer control, and in some cases the data are preprocessed and evaluated by the computer due to the human incomprehensibility of data consisting of thousands of numbers.© (1979) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.