Lifetime and Failure Characteristics of Pt/Ne Hollow Cathode Lamps Used as Calibration Sources for UV Space Instruments

We report accelerated aging tests on three Pt/Ne lamps from the same manufacturing run as lamps installed on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). One lamp was aged in air at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at a current of 10 mA and 50% duty cycle (30 s on, 30 s off) until failure. Two other lamps were aged by the COS instrument development team in a vacuum chamber. Initial radiometrically calibrated spectra were taken of all three lamps at NIST. Calibrated spectra of the air-aged lamp were taken after 206, 500, 778, 783 and 897 hr of operation. Spectra of the vacuum-aged lamps were taken after 500 hr for both lamps, and after 1000 hr for one of the lamps. During vacuum aging, the lamp voltage, photometric stability and temperature were monitored. All three lamps lasted for over 900 hr (100,000 cycles) when run at 10 mA, sufficient for 10-12 years of operation on COS. The total output dropped by less than 15% over 500 hr, with short-term repeatability within a few percent. We recommend that future space operation of these lamps include the lamp voltage in the telemetry as a diagnostic for the lamp aging.