K2P2 — A Photometry Pipeline for the K2 Mission

Lund, Mikkel N.; Handberg, Rasmus; Davies, Guy R.; Chaplin, William J.; Jones, Caitlin D.

K2P2— A Photometry Pipeline for the K2 Mission,
The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 806, Issue 1

Abstract

With the loss of a second reaction wheel, resulting in the inability to point continuously and stably at the same field of view, the NASA Kepler satellite recently entered a new mode of observation known as the K2 mission. The data from this redesigned mission present a specific challenge; the targets systematically drift in position on an ∼6 hr timescale, inducing a significant instrumental signal in the photometric time series—this greatly impacts the ability to detect planetary signals and perform asteroseismic analysis.

Here we detail our version of a reduction pipeline for K2 target pixel data, which automatically defines masks for all targets in a given frame; extracts the target’s flux and position time series; corrects the time series based on the apparent movement on the CCD (either in 1D or 2D), combined with the correction of instrumental and/or planetary signals via the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Operations Center (KASOC) filter, thus rendering the time series ready for asteroseismic analysis; computes power spectra for all targets and identifies potential contaminations between targets. From a test of our pipeline on a sample of targets from the K2 campaign 0, the recovery of data for multiple targets increases the amount of potential light curves by a factor of ≥ 10. Our pipeline could be applied to the upcoming TESS and PLATO 2.0 missions.

Key words: asteroseismology / methods: data analysis / stars: solar-type / techniques: image processing / techniques: photometric

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