arXiv subjects

Melanie Clarke

Publications and source records attributed to Melanie Clarke.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Mitigating Resampling Artifacts for the JWST IFU Spectrometers with Adaptive Trace Modeling

The integral-field unit (IFU) spectrometers on board the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) undersample the nearly diffraction-limited point spread function provided by the telescope optics. This undersampling produces large oscillating spectral artifacts when the data is resampled into regularly-gridded data cubes, which poses a significant challenge for many scientific analyses. We describe here a generalized technique to use cubic basis spline models to interpolate the observed spectral traces onto a higher-resolution grid prior to data cube rectification, which largely eliminates these artifacts in addition to helping reduce biases in point source spectra from clusters of bad pixels. We demonstrate the utility of this adaptive resampling technique for a variety of JWST NIRSpec and MIRI MRS observations ranging from isolated point sources to embedded AGN, crowded stellar fields with diffuse emission, and protostars with rich molecular bands.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2023

Characterization and Absolute Calibration of the Far Infrared Field Integral Line Spectrometer for SOFIA

We present the characterization and definitive flux calibration of the Far-Infrared Field Integral Line Spectrometer (FIFI-LS) instrument on-board SOFIA. The work is based on measurements made in the laboratory with an internal calibrator and on observations of planets, moons, and asteroids as absolute flux calibrators made during the entire lifetime of the instrument. We describe the techniques used to derive flat-fields, water vapor column estimates, detector linearity, spectral and spatial resolutions, and absolute flux calibration. Two sets of responses are presented, before and after the entrance filter window was changed in 2018 to improve the sensitivity at 52um, a wavelength range previously not covered by PACS on Herschel. The relative spectral response of each detector and the illumination pattern of the arrays of the FIFI-LS arrays are derived using the internal calibrator before each observational series. The linearity of the array response is estimated by considering observations of bright sources. We find that the deviation from linearity of the FIFI-LS arrays affects the flux estimations less than 1%. The flux calibration accuracy is estimated to be 15% or better across the entire wavelength range of the instrument. The limited availability of sky calibrators during each observational series is the major limiting factor of the flux calibration accuracy.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2022

Extragalactic magnetism with SOFIA (SALSA Legacy Program) -- III: First data release and on-the-fly polarization mapping characterization

We describe the data processing of the Survey on extragALactic magnetiSm with SOFIA (SALSA Legacy Program). This first data release presents 33% (51.34h out of 155.7h, including overheads) of the total awarded time taken from January 2020 to December 2021. Our observations were performed using the newly implemented on-the-fly mapping (OTFMAP) technique in the polarimetric mode. We present the pipeline steps to obtain homogeneously reduced high-level data products of polarimetric maps of galaxies for use in scientific analysis. Our approach has a general design and can be applied to sources smaller than the field-of-view of the HAWC+ array in any given band. We estimate that the OTFMAP polarimetric mode offers a reduction of observing overheads by a factor 2.34, and an improvement in sensitivity by a factor 1.80 when compared to previously obtained polarimetric observations using the chopping and nodding mode. The OTFMAP is a significant optimization of the polarimetric mode of HAWC+ as it ultimately reduces the cost of operations of SOFIA/HAWC+ by increasing the science collected per hour of observation up to an overall factor of 2.49. The OTFMAP polarimetric mode is the standard observing strategy of SALSA. The results and quantitative analysis of this first data release are presented in Papers IV and V of the series.

astro-ph.GA↗