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Published 2019 | public
Book Section - Chapter

Breathing New Life into an Old Pipeline: Precision Radial Velocity Spectra of TESS Exoplanet Candidates

Abstract

The High Resolution Echelle Spectrograph (HIRES) at the W.M. Keck Observatory (WMKO) is one of the most effective Precision Radial Velocity (PRV) machines available to U.S. astronomers, and will play a major role in radial-velocity follow-up observations of the tens of thousands of exoplanets expected to be discovered by the Transiting Exoplanet Sky Survey (TESS) mission. To support this community effort, the California Planet Search (CPS) team (Andrew Howard, PI) has made available a PRV reduction pipeline that will be available to all U.S. astronomers from February 2019 onwards. Operation of the pipeline has strict requirements on the manner in which observations are acquired, and these will be fully documented for users at the telescope. The pipeline is written in IDL, and was developed over time for internal use by the CPS team in their local processing environment. Development of a modern version of this pipeline in Python is outside the scope of our resources, but it has been updated to support processing in a generic operations environment (e.g. changes to support multiple simultaneous users). We have developed a modern, Python interface to this updated pipeline, which will be accessible as a remote service hosted behind a firewall at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI). Users will be able to use Python clients to access data for input to the pipeline through the Keck Observatory Archive (KOA). The pipeline which will create calibrated and extracted 1D spectra and publication-ready time series, which can be visualized and analyzed on the client side using tools already available in Python. The Python client functions interface with the pipeline through a series of server-side web services. Users will have access to a workspace that will store reduced data and will remain active for the lifetime of the project. This design supports both reduction of data from a single night or long-term orbital monitoring campaigns.

Additional Information

© 2019 Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The PRV pipeline is a collaboration between the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, the Keck Observatory Archive, the California Planet Survey and the W. M. Keck Observatory. We thank the many contributors who have developed the IDL pipeline over the past 25+ years, including: Paul Butler, Geoff Marcy, Jeff Valenti, Steve Vogt, Debra Fischer, Andrew Howard, Jason Wright, John Johnson, Chris McCarthy, Eric Williams, Howard Isaacson, and B.J. Fulton.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
January 14, 2024