An Algorithm to Mitigate Charge Migration Effects in Data from the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph on the James Webb Space Telescope*

Abstract

We present an algorithm that mitigates the effects of charge migration due to the “brighter-fatter effect” (BFE) that occurs for highly illuminated stars in the Teledyne HAWAII-2RG detectors used in the NIRCam, NIRISS, and NIRSpec science instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The impact of this effect is most significant for photometry and spectrophotometry of bright stars in data for which the point-spread function (PSF) is undersampled, which is the case for several observing modes of the NIRISS instrument. The main impact of BFE to NIRISS data is incorrect count rate determinations for pixels in the central regions of PSFs of bright stars due to jump detections that are caused by charge migration from peak pixels to surrounding pixels. The effect is especially significant for bright compact sources in resampled, distortion-free images produced by the drizzle algorithm: quantitatively, apparent flux losses of >50% can occur in such images due to BFE. We describe the algorithm of the “charge_migration” mitigation step that has been implemented in version 10.0 of the operational JWST calibration pipeline as of 2023 December 5. We illustrate the impact of this step in terms of the resulting improvements of the precision of imaging photometry of point sources. The algorithm renders the effects of BFE on photometry and surface brightness measurements to stay within 1%.