|
Tony,
This
is not like a vacuum tube, where there is a finite consumption of a resource as
it is used...
I'm
new at astronomical imaging, but made my living for many years in the television
engineering business.
We've
been using CCD imagers for years, and I have yet to see a camera retired because
of failure of the
CCD
itself.
They
can develop bad pixels, and I have seen some physically damaged (photographer
puts recorder in
trunk
of car, sets camera on the trunk lid and drives down the street trailing the
camera behind), but
even
in that case all three CCDs survived....that optical block was perfectly
good...the rest of the camera
was
trashed.
Sooner
or later migration within the chip will cause a failure, but I would expect
almost all chips to long
outlive the users.
Regards,
Bill
|