Abstract

The CHaracterizing ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) is set to be launched in December 2019 and will detect and characterize small size exoplanets via ultra high precision photometry during transits. CHEOPS is designed as a follow-up telescope and therefore it will monitor a single target at a time. The scientific users will retrieve science-ready light curves of the target that will be automatically generated by the CHEOPS data reduction pipeline of the Science Operations Centre. This paper describes how the pipeline processes the series of raw images and, in particular, how it handles the specificities of CHEOPS data, such as the rotating field of view, the extended irregular point spread function, and the data temporal gaps in the context of the strict photometric requirements of the mission. The current status and performance of the main processing stages of the pipeline, that is the calibration, correction, and photometry, are presented to allow the users to understand how the science-ready data have been derived. Finally, the general performance of the pipeline is illustrated via the processing of representative scientific cases generated by the mission simulator.

Highlights

  • The CHaracterizing ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) is an ESA small mission to be launched in December of 2019

  • The scientific users will retrieve science-ready light curves of the target that will be automatically generated by the CHEOPS data reduction pipeline of the Science Operations Centre

  • This paper describes how the pipeline processes the series of raw images and, in particular, how it handles the specificities of CHEOPS data, such as the rotating field of view, the extended irregular point spread function, and the data temporal gaps in the context of the strict photometric requirements of the mission

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Summary

Introduction

The CHaracterizing ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) is an ESA small mission to be launched in December of 2019. Because of its orbit at low altitude, it is expected that up to 40% of data could be lost due to the close passage of the Earth to the line of sight for targets far from the ecliptic in addition to the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) crossings (Pinheiro da Silva et al 2008) These losses translate into time gaps in the raw data products received by the DRP and in the final light curves delivered by the pipeline. The complete processing can be separated in three main steps: (1) the calibration module which corrects the instrumental response, (2) the correction module on charge of correcting environmental effects and (3) the photometry module which transforms the resulting calibrated and corrected images into a calibrated flux time series or light curve. The first step in the calibration module is the event flagging, which is a general function of the pipeline responsible to flag images previous to any processing of data

Bias and readout noise
Dark current
Findings
Conclusions

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