The Integral Field Unit on the James Webb Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Spectrograph

Closs, Martin F.; Ferruit, Pierre; Lobb, Daniel R.; Preuss, W.; Rolt, Stephen; Talbot, R. Gordon

doi:10.1117/12.788820

Cited by 15 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…In addition to providing insight into the resolved structure of stellar populations, galactic winds, and dynamical evolution in the local universe (e.g., Belfiore et al 2015;Li et al 2015;Wilkinson et al 2015), the MaNGA data set will be an invaluable legacy product with which to help understand galaxies in the distant universe. As next-generation facilities come online in the final years of the MaNGA survey, IFU spectrographs such as TMT/IRIS Wright et al 2014), James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)/NIRSPEC (Closs et al 2008;Birkmann et al 2014), and JWST/MIRI-MRS (Wells et al 2015) will trace the crucial rest-optical bandpass in galaxies out to redshift z∼10 and beyond.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

THE DATA REDUCTION PIPELINE FOR THE SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU GALAXY SURVEY

Law¹,

Cherinka²,

Yan³

et al. 2016

419

307

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Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) is an optical fiber-bundle integral-field unit (IFU) spectroscopic survey that is one of three core programs in the fourth-generation Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV). With a spectral coverage of 3622-10354 Å and an average footprint of ∼500 arcsec 2 per IFU the scientific data products derived from MaNGA will permit exploration of the internal structure of a statistically large sample of 10,000 low-redshift galaxies in unprecedented detail. Comprising 174 individually pluggable science and calibration IFUs with a near-constant data stream, MaNGA is expected to obtain ∼100 million raw-frame spectra and ∼10 million reduced galaxy spectra over the six-year lifetime of the survey. In this contribution, we describe the MaNGA Data Reduction Pipeline algorithms and centralized metadata framework that produce skysubtracted spectrophotometrically calibrated spectra and rectified three-dimensional data cubes that combine individual dithered observations. For the 1390 galaxy data cubes released in Summer 2016 as part of SDSS-IV Data Release 13, we demonstrate that the MaNGA data have nearly Poisson-limited sky subtraction shortward of ∼8500 Å and reach a typical 10σ limiting continuum surface brightness μ=23.5 AB arcsec −2 in a five-arcseconddiameter aperture in the g-band. The wavelength calibration of the MaNGA data is accurate to 5 km s −1 rms, with a median spatial resolution of 2.54 arcsec FWHM (1.8 kpc at the median redshift of 0.037) and a median spectral resolution of σ=72 km s −1 .

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

THE DATA REDUCTION PIPELINE FOR THE SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU GALAXY SURVEY

Law¹,

Cherinka²,

Yan³

et al. 2016

419

307

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“…NIRSpec's integral field unit is a powerful tool to enable 3D spectral imaging over a contiguous area of the sky [63,64]. The aperture for the spatially resolved spectroscopy Figure 4.…”

Section: The Near Infrared Spectrograph (Nirspec)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Scientific discovery with the James Webb Space Telescope

Kalirai

2018

Contemporary Physics

118

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For the past 400 years, astronomers have sought to observe and interpret the Universe by building more powerful telescopes. These incredible instruments extend the capabilities of one of our most important senses, sight, towards new limits such as increased sensitivity and resolution, new dimensions such as exploration of wavelengths across the full electromagnetic spectrum, new information content such as analysis through spectroscopy, and new cadences such as rapid time-series views of the variable sky. The results from these investments, from small to large telescopes on the ground and in space, have completely transformed our understanding of the Universe; including the discovery that Earth is not the center of the Universe, that the Milky Way is one among many galaxies in the Universe, that relic cosmic background radiation fills all space in the early Universe, that that the expansion rate of the Universe is accelerating, that exoplanets are common around stars, that gravitational waves exist, and much more. For modern astronomical research, the next wave of breakthroughs in fields ranging over planetary, stellar, galactic, and extragalactic science motivate a general-purpose observatory that is optimized at nearand mid-infrared wavelengths, and that has much greater sensitivity, resolution, and spectroscopic multiplexing than all previous telescopes. This scientific vision, from measuring the composition of rocky worlds in the nearby Milky Way galaxy to finding the first sources of light in the Universe to other topics at the forefront of modern astrophysics, motivates the state-of-the-art James Webb Space Telescope (Webb). In this review paper, I summarize the design and technical capabilities of Webb and the scientific opportunities that it enables.

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“…The NIRSpec IFU design is based around an image slicer element consisting of 30 stacked mirror surfaces that are curved and tilted with respect to each other so that the image is split into 30 individual slitlets, each of which is directed onto a dedicated pupil mirror (Closs et al 2008). In this way, the 3 × 3 square FOV is dissected into 30 slices of 0.1 width (spectral direction) and 3 length (spatial direction).…”

Section: Integral Field Unitmentioning

confidence: 99%

A model-based approach to the spatial and spectral calibration of NIRSpec onboard JWST

Dorner

Giardino

Ferruit

et al. 2016

A&A

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Context. The NIRSpec instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can be operated in multiobject spectroscopy (MOS), long-slit, and integral field unit (IFU) mode with spectral resolutions from 100 to 2700. Its MOS mode uses about a quarter of a million individually addressable minislits for object selection, covering a field of view of ∼9 arcmin 2 . Aims. The pipeline used to extract wavelength-calibrated spectra from NIRSpec detector images relies heavily on a model of NIRSpec optical geometry. We demonstrate how dedicated calibration data from a small subset of NIRSpec modes and apertures can be used to optimize this parametric model to the necessary levels of fidelity. Methods. Following an iterative procedure, the initial fiducial values of the model parameters are manually adjusted and then automatically optimized, so that the model predicted location of the images and spectral lines from the fixed slits, the IFU, and a small subset of the MOS apertures matches their measured location in the main optical planes of the instrument. Results. The NIRSpec parametric model is able to reproduce the spatial and spectral position of the input spectra with high fidelity. The intrinsic accuracy (1-sigma, rms) of the model, as measured from the extracted calibration spectra, is better than 1/10 of a pixel along the spatial direction and better than 1/20 of a resolution element in the spectral direction for all of the grating-based spectral modes. This is fully consistent with the corresponding allocation in the spatial and spectral calibration budgets of NIRSpec.

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The Integral Field Unit on the James Webb Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Spectrograph

Cited by 15 publications

References 4 publications

THE DATA REDUCTION PIPELINE FOR THE SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU GALAXY SURVEY

THE DATA REDUCTION PIPELINE FOR THE SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU GALAXY SURVEY

Scientific discovery with the James Webb Space Telescope

A model-based approach to the spatial and spectral calibration of NIRSpec onboard JWST

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