Instrument Signature Removal and Calibration Products for the Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time

TL;DR

This paper details the development and implementation of instrument signature removal and calibration processes in the LSST data pipeline, crucial for accurate astronomical imaging over a decade-long survey.

Contribution

It presents the current state of LSST's ISR pipelines, calibration product generation, verification, and data management strategies for precise image correction.

Findings

Effective ISR pipelines are established for LSST data processing.

Calibration products are generated and verified for accuracy.

The data management system organizes calibrations to support image correction.

Abstract

The Vera C. Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will conduct an unprecedented optical survey of the southern sky, imaging the entire available sky every few nights for 10 years. To achieve its ambitious science goals of probing dark energy and dark matter, mapping the Milky Way, and exploring the transient optical sky, the systematic errors in the LSST data must be exquisitely controlled. Instrument signature removal (ISR) is a critical early step in LSST data processing to remove inherent camera effects from the raw images and produce accurate representations of the incoming light. This paper describes the current state of the ISR pipelines implemented in the LSST Science Pipelines software. The key steps in ISR are outlined, and the process of generating and verifying the necessary calibration products to carry out ISR is also discussed. Finally, an overview is given of how the Rubin data management system utilizes a data Butler and calibration collections to organize datasets and match images to appropriate calibrations during processing. Precise ISR will be essential to realize the potential of LSST to revolutionize astrophysics.