Space radiation damage to HDTV camera CCDs onboard the international space station

The image quality of high-definition television (HDTV) cameras and camcorders for space activity is degraded by the presence of permanent bright pixels (so-called “white defects”) due to space radiation. We studied the space radiation damage to HDTV charge-coupled devices (CCDs; 2 × 106 pixels per chip) loaded in the Russian service module (SM) of the International Space Station (ISS) for 71 days, 256 days and 446 days. We used the “Passive Dosimeter for Lifescience Experiments in Space” (PADLES), which consists of CR-39 plastic nuclear track detectors (PNTDs) and thermoluminescent dosimeters, to measure space radiation doses received by the HDTV CCDs in the SM during loading periods. The average production rates of white defects for output voltage greater than 0.5 mV were 2.366 ± 0.055 pixels/day in Si and 5.213 ± 0.071 pixels/mGy in Si. We also investigated the correlation between the position of the white defects and tracks of high-energy particles with LET∞,Si of approximately 300 keV/μm or more using stacks of CR-39 PNTDs and the HDTV CCD chips. We found that approximately 30% of these high-energy high-LET particles coincided with the position of white defects on the HDTV CCDs in the SM.