Increasing Sensitivity to Trailed Solar System Objects in Archival JWST NIRCam Imaging with Group Differencing

Abstract

The JWST archive contains thousands of NIRCam exposures distributed across the sky. Small solar system bodies (SSSBs) are present in many of these fields, but are often trailed and more difficult to detect. The standard pipeline produces a single image by fitting a slope to a sequence of $N$ cumulative ``up-the-ramp" groups of the detector. Thus, each JWST image comprises a time series of cumulative reads. We demonstrate that transforming the ramp into a series of group difference images reduces the per-image trail length of moving sources, producing an $(N-1)$-group photometrically calibrated time series from an $N$-group integration. This enables higher-cadence trajectory-based searches using as few as a single JWST exposure. A generalized least-squares fit of the group difference images along the trajectory of a moving source recovers the source flux at higher SNR when compared to the ramp fit, with the improvement scaling with the reduction in trailing. We validate our procedure on 13 moving objects detected in archival JWST NIRCam images. To estimate our sensitivity increase, we perform an injection/recovery simulation on the JWST imagery. Trailed moving objects recovered via group differencing show higher SNRs, improving completeness to moving sources compared to standard calibrations. For typical integration lengths of $N=4$ or $6$ for archival JWST/NIRCam exposures in the ecliptic, group differencing yields sensitivity gains between $\sim 1.1$--$1.4$ mag, based on simulation results. This method significantly increases the sensitivity of archival JWST surveys to trailed SSSBs.