2023-07-26 TSO WG Meeting notes

Nestor Espinoza 

• Brian Brooks   outlines that the STScI D2P project has a draft page, which should be updated with the identified by Everett Schlawin  mismatch between header keywords and INT_TIMES. The page needs to be updated due this Friday
• Nestor Espinoza mentions an upcoming gather town meeting of the Strategic Exoplanet Initiative on July 31st at 9am ET. The meeting will be centered on early career researchers (up to 10 years after PhD).

Nikolay Nikolov 

• Nikolay Nikolov presented a summary of all archived observations in the past two weeks: 18 TSOs using BOTS (9), MIRI (5), SOSS (3), NIRCam (1). He mentions that TSOs with successful target acquisition (TA) and issues of the actual science exposure can still have status "Archived". Nikolay Nikolov presents a list of upcoming observations of which 2 have been scheduled and 10 with a status "Scheduling". 
• Elena Manjavacas and Michael Regan comment that there are reprocessing issues that delay recently obtained data to become available on the MAST archive. 

Derod Deal Nestor Espinoza 

Derod Deal presents a new Python tool called SPELUNKER, which downloads and analyzes FGS data for a given JWST TSO.  

Capabilities: The tool aligns all the images for a star, performs 2D Gaussian fits to measure PSF properties (including x,y, FWHM and orientation), visualizes the properties as a function of time (producing both plots and animations) and performs periodogram analysis. The pipeline conveniently obtains mnemonics that detail HGA start/end moves and indicates those in the plots. Filter moves , currents and other physical properties are obtained from mnemonics to enable correlation analysis with light curves. The pipeline has the capability to look at multiple guide stars.

Installation: The pipeline is easy to instal with the pip command and requires simply the PID of a given program to run.

Future plans: Derod Deal  plans to explore the FGS data for stellar activity and create images from stacking and aligning images from the FGS data.

Everett Schlawin suggests one check to be included would be to look at the mnemonics for the exposure start and end to see how they align with the corresponding times from the header key words.  

Nestor Espinoza demonstrated the highly-complementary value of the FGS data to a relevant TSO. He shows plot of the FGS properties as a function of time compared to properties obtained from a TSO spectra. The FGS data shows much clearer tilt events and specifically changes in the OTE that pressed a tilt event. Nestor Espinoza is preparing a Jupyter Notebook that will be made available for the community.  

Nestor Espinoza Nikolay Nikolov 

Nestor Espinoza mentions that the D2P initiative is going on now at STScI. The initiative aligns with the priorities of the TSO WG FY2024 plan, which needs to focus on short-term and long-term wins (STW and LTW, respectively) detailed below. The final FY2024 plan will need to be presented this September.

STW: IDENTIFICATION & COMMUNICATION of TSO issues to the community. The objective here is to be swift in identifying and communicating pipeline issues. This includes TSO pipeline validation and study, documentation of issues and suggested workaround solutions and investigating data quality. One example includes experience with SOSS data, where the data quality flags were identified in TSO analysis to produce issues with the pipeline. There is a need to enable  quick looks of the latest pipeline release on a standard data set. To achieve this goal, we can build upon our pipeline testing experience from 2020.

 LTW: IMPLEMENTATION  of improved TSO algorithms. Since there are several TSO pipelines in the literature and ongoing initiatives to develop new one, it would take time to identify the best practices. New ideas including identification of 1/f noise and cosmic rays would first be established and validated and tested before we can start implementing them in the pipeline. 

Nestor Espinoza Everett Schlawin Michael Regan Brian Brooks Elena Manjavacas Nikolay Nikolov 

Michael Regan MIRI: the jump detection step now uses threshold instead of reference file to characterize the noise for MIRI; this approach now is tested for all instruments with NIRCam already passing the test successfully.

Nestor Espinoza SOSS: went 2 times offline the past weeks and the team is investigating what was the exact cause with temperature corrections or CR suspected as potential causes.

Brian Brooks NIRCam: the team has been asked to track background variations in the imaging data. Current analysis demonstrates good overall agreement with commissioning results. Everett Schlawin  comments on an ongoing experiment with offsets of NIRCam TSOs with the goal to achieve an improvement on the 1/f subtraction. Preliminary results indicate that while the 1/f went lower cosmetically on the images, still there are systematics in the light curves.

Elena Manjavacas NIRSpec: there was a TA failure for a TSO program due to incorrectly specified coordinates. She emphasizes the fact that PIs need to be extra cautious in providing accurate Gaia coordinates along with a relevant epoch.

Nestor Espinoza mentions that there is an initiative with Patrick Ogle to perform an automated check for accuracy of the coordinates in TSO APT submissions. Nikolay Nikolov adds that this would have a positive impact on all programs that require a TA i.e., not only the TSO programs.