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PreprintCC BY 4.0arXiv

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
Open at sourcePDFDOICite

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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Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@misc{fazar2026bestiary,
  title = {{A bestiary of low-level electrical artifacts in SPHEREx flight data}},
  author = {Candice M. Fazar and Michael Zemcov and C. Darren Dowell and Brendan P. Crill and Chi Nguyen and Howard Hui},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.09862},
  eprint = {2608.09862},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09862},
  note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY  - UNPB
TI  - A bestiary of low-level electrical artifacts in SPHEREx flight data
AU  - Candice M. Fazar
AU  - Michael Zemcov
AU  - C. Darren Dowell
AU  - Brendan P. Crill
AU  - Chi Nguyen
AU  - Howard Hui
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/08/28
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.09862
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09862
AB  - 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.
ER  -