TMCF PGE: RTS

High-energetic protons (> 10 MeV) trapped in the Earth's magnetic field can cause either a short-duration spike in the measurement data (called a transient), or permanent damage to the CCD detector pixels that are hit. The permanent damage manifests itself as an increased dark current of the pixel, and/or increased noise in that pixel, and/or the appearance of so-called Random Telegraph Signal (RTS) effects. RTS effects can be observed as jumping of the detector dark signal between two or more quasistable levels. Permanent damage to CCD pixels originating from proton hits does not automatically render the pixels useless for science applications. Only a very small fraction of pixels that are affected by proton radiation damage can no longer be used for scientific purposes and are flagged accordingly. This TMCF PGE determines which unbinned CCD detector pixels are affected by RTS and categorises the severity of the RTS. It does so by investigating long time series of long-exposure unbinned dark measurements (instrument configuration ID's 141 and 142). The RTS PGE is currently configured to use 40 days of unbinned long-exposure dark measurements as input. The PGE looks for changing signal levels and uses these to estimate the severity of the RTS. The RTS maps are currently dynamically updated on a daily frequency (can be configured), where the PGE always uses the last 40 available days as input. The output products are stored in the TMCF database, along with their metadata. The output of the TMCF RTS PGE is used as one of the inputs for the Bad and Dead Pixel Map (BDPM) TMCF PGE.