PACMAN: A pipeline to reduce and analyze Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 IR Grism data

TL;DR

PACMAN is an end-to-end pipeline that efficiently reduces and analyzes Hubble WFC3 IR grism data, enabling detailed exoplanet atmosphere characterization through spectral extraction and light curve fitting.

Contribution

It introduces PACMAN, a comprehensive pipeline for processing HST/WFC3 data, which has been used in numerous publications and enhances exoplanet spectral analysis capabilities.

Findings

PACMAN has been used in multiple published studies.

The pipeline improves efficiency in spectral data reduction.

It supports detailed exoplanet atmospheric analysis.

Abstract

Here we present PACMAN, an end-to-end pipeline developed to reduce and analyze HST/WFC3 data. The pipeline includes both spectral extraction and light curve fitting. The foundation of PACMAN has been already used in numerous publications (e.g., Kreidberg et al., 2014; Kreidberg et al., 2018) and these papers have already accumulated hundreds of citations. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has become the preeminent workhorse facility for the characterization of extrasolar planets. HST currently has two of the most powerful space-based tools for characterizing exoplanets over a broad spectral range: The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) in the UV and the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in the Near Infrared. With the introduction of a spatial scan mode on WFC3 where the star moves perpendicular to the dispersion direction during an exposure, WFC3 observations have become very efficient due to the reduction of overhead time and the possibility of longer exposures without saturation. For exoplanet characterization, WFC3 is used for transit and secondary eclipse spectroscopy, and phase curve observations. The instrument has two different grisms: G102 with a spectral range from 800 nm to up to 1150 nm and G141 encompassing 1075 nm to about 1700 nm. The spectral range of WFC3/G141 is primarily sensitive to molecular absorption from water at approximately 1.4 microns. This led to the successful detection of water in the atmosphere of over a dozen of exoplanets. The bluer part of WFC3, the G102 grism, is also sensitive to water and most notably led to the first detection of a helium exosphere.