InfraRed detectors In Space (IRIS) Workshop

10 Mar 2026, 08:00 → 12 Mar 2026, 19:00 Europe/Rome

Room 216 (mezzanine floor) (CNR Area Territoriale della Ricerca Bologna)

Eduardo Medinaceli Villegas (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF)), Rémi Barbier (Bertin Technologies)

IRIS Calibration and Performance Workshop 2026

Website link: https://indico.ict.inaf.it/e/IRISworkshop2026

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Workshop Scope

The primary objective of the workshop is to perform a comparative analysis of calibration strategies adopted by current space missions operating in the infrared domain, with emphasis on evaluating their achieved scientific and instrumental performance. The workshop will focus on identifying key calibration challenges and examining the diverse methodological approaches employed to address them. This will be achieved by engaging international specialists in the field to present calibration schemes and the latest results from operational missions, as well as the ongoing work of missions currently under development.

Particular emphasis will be placed on operational experience from contemporary space telescopes, enabling cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer among instrumentation specialists and scientific teams with mission-specific objectives. This will also serve to disseminate established best practices and empirically derived lessons learned from current infrared missions. Recent advances in infrared detector technology will be presented, and emerging mission concepts will illustrate strategies for leveraging these developments.

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Scientific Programme Overview

The workshop mainly addresses the topics covered in the following six sessions.

• Space Missions Overview

Review of operating and upcoming space observatories equipped with state-of-the-art infrared sensors.

• Technology Development / New Mission Concepts

The latest advances in infrared detectors and front-end electronics technologies are presented, along with their prospective use in future mission concepts.

• Data Acquisition / Signal Estimation

Different approaches to data acquisition and signal estimation strategies are compared, with particular emphasis on innovative techniques.

• Infrared Detector Characterisation

Support activities for detector development, including testing and characterisation, are discussed. Specific methodologies for assessing key detector effects are presented, along with the main simulation toolkits for infrared detectors.  

• Pre-launch Characterisation Strategies

Overview of mission-specific approaches for end-to-end characterisation of the signal detection chain. 

• In-flight Calibration and Performance

Case studies illustrating how detector systematics propagate through data processing and calibration pipelines, and how they impact overall performance. 

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Tuesday 10 March

08:00 → 09:00 Registration

09:00 → 09:30 Welcome and Workshop Agenda

09:30 → 13:00 Space Missions Overview: Operation and development of near-infrared instruments

Review of operating and upcoming space observatories equipped with state-of-the-art infrared sensors.

09:30 Overview of three decades of infrared detectors in space - M. Robberto

09:55 Euclid - P. Ferruit

10:15 JWST - T. Brown

10:35 SPHEREx - P. Korngut

10:55 Coffee Break

11:25 JUICE - F. Poulet

11:45 ARIEL - E. Pascale

12:05 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

I will give an overview of the Roman Space Telescope, with a focus on the 18 Teledyne H4RG-10 detectors of its flagship Wide Field Instrument. The science requirements for Roman-WFI are unprecedented in the level of calibration that they demand, from <0.1% knowledge of the observed point-spread function, to <0.4% nonlinearity over four orders of magnitude, to ultra-low persistence. I will summarize the importance of these requirements to Roman science and review the ongoing progress towards meeting them.

Speaker: Timothy Brandt

12:25 ARRAKHIS - M. Sirianni

12:45 Buffer

13:00 → 15:00 Lunch Break / Poster Session #1

15:00 → 18:30 Technology Development / New Mission Concepts

The latest advances in infrared detectors and front-end electronics technologies are presented, along with their prospective use in future mission concepts.

15:00 Teledyne's Infrared Focal Plane Technologies for Space Missions: Heritage, Present Products, and Future Developments

This talk presents Teledyne's heritage in space missions, the suite of IR FPAs that are at readiness levels TRL-6 to TRL-9, and developments underway that may benefit future missions.

Speaker: James Beletic

15:25 Technology Development at LEONARDO - TBC

15:45 Technology Development at Markury Electronics - M. Loose

16:05 Coffee Break

16:35 Technology Development at ESA - M. Soman

16:55 Technology Development at CEA-Leti - O. Gravrand

17:15 New Mission Concepts: THESEUS - D. Gotz

17:35 New Mission Concepts: Gaia NIR - D. Hobbs

17:55 Buffer

Wednesday 11 March

09:30 → 13:00 Data Acquisition / Signal Estimation

Different approaches to data acquisition and signal estimation strategies are compared, with particular emphasis on innovative techniques.

09:30 Wide Field Images Combination: PyImom - C. Hirata (TBC)

09:55 Euclid's NISP signal estimator

Speaker: Fabrizio Cogato (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF))

10:20 New advanced readout modes in JWST - E. Bergeron

25 min

10:45 Coffee Break

11:15 New acquisition techniques in SPHEREx - P. Korngut

25 min

11:40 Deidicated Firmware JUICE - F. Poulet

25 min

12:05 Buffer

13:00 → 15:00 Lunch Break / Poster Session #2

15:00 → 18:30 Infrared Detectors Characterization

Support activities for detector development, including testing and characterisation, are discussed. Specific methodologies for assessing key detector effects are presented, along with the main simulation toolkits for infrared detectors.

15:00 Avalanche photodiodes (APDs) testing at ESA/ESTEC

Building on the remarkable achievements of Gaia in mapping the Milky Way in multiple dimensions, and in alignment with the ESA Voyage 2050 science programme, advancing galactic astrometry into the near-infrared has emerged as a promising direction for the fourth ESA large class mission. Achieving this goal will depend on significant progress in the development of the mission's detection chain, requiring technologies capable of delivering high-speed, low-noise, and high-precision measurements in the near-infrared range. At the ESA payload validation section (SCI-FIV) in ESTEC, substantial work has focused on strengthening the capabilities of European infrared detectors, with large array, linear mode avalanche photodiodes (LmAPD) in a Mercury Cadmium Telluride (MCT) substrate standing out as a particularly promising solution to meet the demanding mission requirements. This presentation will show the main challenges, results, and way forwards coming from the characterisation performed over the past year.

Speaker: Vincent Affattato

15:25 APD characterisation - M. Bottom (TBC)

15:50 Glow characterisation at ESA - L. Boucher

16:15 Coffee Break

16:45 IR detectors characterisation CEA-Leti - O. Gravrand

17:10 IPC characterization at CPPM - A. Secroun

17:35 Characterization of the H4RG-10s of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Speaker: Gregory Mosby

18:00 Ground based projects - S. Smee

18:25 Buffer

Thursday 12 March

09:30 → 13:00 Pre-launch Characterization Strategies

Overview of the mission-specific approaches for end-to-end characterisation of the detection chain.

09:30 Preparing for the ARIEL System-level cryo-test campaign - I. Argyriou

25 min

09:55 ARIEL FGS characterization - G. Szymanski

10:20 ARIEL AIRS characterization - J. Amiaux

10:45 New mission - TBC

11:10 Coffee Break

11:40 Simulation Contribution (Pyxel) - F. Lemmel

12:00 Simulation Contribution (ExoSim/ARIELRAD) - L. Mugnai

12:15 Simulation Contribution - Round Table (TBC)

12:30 Buffer

13:00 → 14:30 Lunch Break / Poster Session #3

14:30 → 18:00 In-flight Calibration and Performance

Case studies illustrating how detector systematics propagate through data processing and calibration pipelines, and how they impact overall performance.

14:30 Euclid - Impact of detector effects on Photometric Data Processing - G. Polenta

14:55 Euclid - Impact of detector effects on Spectroscopic Data Processing - Y. Copin

15:20 Reaching the ultimate readnoise with advanced pipeline (JWST) - M. Regan

15:45 Coffee Break

16:15 Euclid - Persistence In-flight calibration - S. Conseil

16:40 Cosmic Rays with JWST/NIRSpec - B. Rauscher

17:05 Snowballs/Cosmic Rays with Euclid/NISP - L. Gabarra

17:30 Buffer

18:00 → 18:30 Wrap-up and Next Appointments