Transiting extrasolar planets present an opportunity for probing atmospheric conditions and constituents by taking advantage of different apparent radii, hence transit depth as a function of wavelength. Strong near-IR bands should support detection of water vapor via G141 spectroscopy of the bright star HD 209458 (H=6.13) by comparing in- and out-of-transit ratios of in- and out-of-band spectral intensity ratios. The reduction and analysis of science observations in which the goal is to support 1 part in 10,000, or better, development of spectral diagnostics using NICMOS grism-based spectroscopy is discussed

Gilliland, Ronald L.

NASA Technical Reports Server

The 2005 HST Calibration Workshop
Space Telescope Science Institute, 2005
A. M. Koekemoer, P. Goudfrooij, and L. L. Dressel, eds.
Differential NICMOS Spectrophotometry at High S/N
Ronald L. Gilliland1
Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218
Abstract. Transiting extrasolar planets present an opportunity for probing atmo-
spheric conditions and constituents by taking advantage of different apparent radii,
hence transit depth as a function of wavelength. Strong near-IR bands should sup-
port detection of water vapor via G141 spectroscopy of the bright star HD 209458
(H=6.13) by comparing in- and out-of-transit ratios of in- and out-of-band spectral
intensity ratios. The reduction and analysis of science observations in which the goal
is to support 1 part in 10,000, or better, development of spectral diagnostics using
NICMOS grism-based spectroscopy is discussed.
1. Introduction
The study of extrasolar planetary atmospheres was initiated five years ago with detec-
tion of Sodium in the atmosphere of HD 209458b (Charbonneau et al. 2002) using STIS
spectroscopy comparing spectra taken in- versus outside-of-transit. The STIS observations
required use of the instrument well beyond its design goals in terms of signal-to-noise and
stability, since the signal detected was only at the 2.32 ± 0.57 × 10−4 level for the relative
increase of depth of the Sodium resonance doublet at 589.3 nm during transit.
During a planet transit light is blocked both by the solid body, and possibly by an
extended atmosphere. If the extended atmosphere is opaque at some wavelengths, but
transparent in others, then relatively more light (hence a deeper transit) will be blocked in
the opaque wavelengths. Since atmospheres are generally very thin compared to the planet
radius, this type of differential spectroscopy requires the search for small signals. Following
proof of concept with the STIS results, it would now be most interesting to detect evidence
for primary molecules such as water in extrasolar planet atmospheres. Although some water
features exist in the optical, these are in the low QE/high fringing domain for CCDs, but
much stronger bands are readily available in the near IR. Water has a strong band near
1.45 µ (see, e.g., Brown 2001 for predictions of signal strength over wavelengths of 0.3 to
2.5 µ for transmission spectroscopy of extrasolar planet atmospheres).
As part of qualifying NICMOS and its IR detector for high S/N applications, we had an
earlier calibration result in which similar observations were obtained, but only during stable
out-of-transit times. The results of this were released in NICMOS ISR 2003-01 (Gilliland
and Arribas 2003), and concluded that differential spectrophotometry could be obtained
that would support the one part in ten thousand goal. This current report provides an
update based upon preliminary analysis of data from GO-9832, PI Tim Brown.
In order to obtain a detection of water vapor we initially considered how this might best
be approached with NICMOS. Two primary possibilities for differential study of a feature
near 1.45 µ exist: (1) There is a “Water” filter for NIC 1 with a central wavelength of 1.45
1Based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science
Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA
contract NAS 5-26555.
162
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20060047847 2019-08-29T18:48:37+00:00Z
Differential NICMOS Spectrophotometry at High S/N 163
µ that could be used to observe this band. (2) The NIC 3 G141 grism covering 1.1 to 1.9 µ
could be used to simultaneously span wavelengths both inside and outside the water feature.
Once it is realized that the signal sought may be as small as 10−5, requiring detection of 1010
photons just to obtain sufficiently small Poisson fluctuations, and control of all systematic
errors to this same small level, the inadequacy of using a filter becomes clear. To use the
1.45 µ filter to obtain knowledge of how this feature changes during transit, in comparison
to a control band, would require cycling between filters; this in conjunction with the need
to take very short exposures to avoid saturation on this H = 6.13 star would not support
reaching the desired Poisson limit. Use of the grism provides two essential advantages: (1)
The light is dispersed over order 100 pixels, thus allowing a much higher rate of photon
collection, and even with instrument defocus HD 209458 reaches half of full well depth in
only 2 seconds. (2) By simultaneously observing in- and out-of-band, the ability to correct
for systematics, such as instrument sensitive drift, is far superior.
Having decided on the grism, the next decision involved dithering strategy. We explored
the possibility of trailing the telescope in the cross-dispersion direction, taking about 60
seconds to trail over 200 pixels would provide the desired exposure to half of full well depth.
But, ultimately, this proved impractical, if not impossible, for the ground system to support.
The signal that we will pursue here is doubly differential. By this we mean that: (a) we care
only about the relative change of brightness between wavelengths in-band (1.35 - 1.55 µ)
to those in nearby continuum, and (b) we care only about how the latter quantity changes
between times during the 3 hour transit to nearby times outside of transit. Since we care
only about relative changes, it seems best to dither not at all, if the guiding is expected
to be perfectly stable, or to dither only by an amount required to internally calibrate the
response to the expected small guiding errors. Were we to dither the spectrum to unique
pixels in an attempt to provide more accurate results this would have the effect of mixing
in additional errors in the time domain; our best bet is to maintain an essentially constant
pointing and take advantage of searching only for differential changes.
2. The Observations
With a full width of about 3 hours for the HD 209458b transit, it is possible to obtain
equal coverage of times inside and outside transit with four contiguous HST orbits roughly
centered on the transit. STIS experience suggested that instrumental stability is much
poorer during the first orbit on the new target, our NICMOS experience suggests the same
and we adopted the strategy of using five HST orbits to span a planetary transit, but not
expecting to utilize the first HST orbit.
Even with dispersion over 100 pixels using the grism, HD 209458 would saturate NIC
3 in less than 1 second. Since there is a significant overhead associated with new MULTI-
ACCUMS, and the minimum exposure time in any case is 0.3 seconds, it is advantageous
to use moderate defocus. We chose an offset of -0.5 mm for the PAM to provide a FWHM
of about 5 – 6 pixels in the cross dispersion direction. This sacrifices spectral resolution at
the level of a factor of 2 – 3, but allows “longer” exposure times of 1.99 seconds to be used
in which the exposure reaches only half of full well depth. Using STEP1 MULTIACCUMS
with NSAMP = 4, this defocus yields spectra with peak per pixel count levels of 70,000 e-,
or about 400,000 e- after summing over cross dispersion. Even with using a spectral element
to spread the image over many pixels along the dispersion direction, using significant defo-
cus, and adopting a MULTIACCUM option with a small number of samples the duty cycle
(fraction of available exposure time during which photons are actually collected) is only
18%. The latter implies, that should this general approach work, then significantly fainter
stars could be observed without an initially equal loss of sensitivity, since much larger duty
cycles could be used.
164 Gilliland
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Figure 1: A G141 spectrum from GO-9832. The first order spectrum of interest is in the
lower, center part of NIC 3, and was placed on a relatively clean (in terms of pixel quality)
portion of the detector.
A typical example (one of 3,142 used) of a pipeline cal.fits data product is shown in
Figure 1. The data for GO-9832 consists of 3 visits (observed in 2003, 2004, and 2005),
each of 5 orbits roughly centered on the 3-hour planetary transit. About 250 exposures are
obtained per HST orbit.
3. Data Reductions
The grism data are not flat-fielded as part of the pipeline reductions, since the appropriate
flat would be wavelength dependent and dependent upon the distribution of sources in
the field of view. In our case, with just a single point source, we have used the reference
dispersion solution for G141 to provide wavelengths for each column in the first order
spectrum. Then the current on-orbit flats for F108N, F113N, F164N, F166N, F187N, F190N
and F196N are used to fit the wavelength dependence of the flats as a quadratic function
at each pixel. The resulting quadratic was then evaluated at the appropriate wavelength
by column and applied as a multiplicative correction for all pixels to be summed over in
the spectral extraction. This worked very well with rms residuals over the 7 flats usually at
the 0.001 level. Outside of the pixel area dominated by the first order spectrum, I simply
adopted the F160W flat field to represent a wavelength integrated mean.
Regions well away from the spectrum (and ghosts) were chosen to allow provision of
a mean, per-frame background (determined from sigma-clipped averages) which was then
subtracted globally. Inspections have been made to determine if pedestal corrections need
to be applied, for these ultra-high S/N observations a correction for pedestal does not seem
necessary. Pixels within the spectral extraction region that are either dead or noisy have
been identified and interpolated over in each individual frame (identified from both the data
quality array and close inspection of the data, including ‘chi-squared’ maps of variance over
a stack of nominally identical images).
Differential NICMOS Spectrophotometry at High S/N 165
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Figure 2: Variations of external parameters for from top: y-postion (cross-dispersion place-
ment in pixels), width of the spectrum (Gaussian fit in pixels), spectrum rotation from one
end to the other, x-position (from cross-correlation of extracted spectra), and temperature
of the detector. Data from the 5 orbits are concatonated together for display purposes,
vertical lines indicate the separate orbits.
Intensities are extracted as a simple aperture sum over the first order spectrum (up to a
20 pixel wide extraction box has been used to include most of the stellar flux). Measurements
of spectral y-positions, cross-dispersion widths, and order rotation (along x) are obtained
by fitting a Gaussian in cross-dispersion at many columns along the spectra, then averaging
these. Exposure-to-exposure shifts in dispersion are obtained by cross-correlating individual
extracted spectra with a mean spectrum. The temperature record in use was provided by
Eddie Bergeron.
Two time series are of interest. The first is simply the direct intensity which shows the
transit feature as a 1.6% dip. The second is the ratio of Water-band to nearby continuum
band with removal of, and normalization by the mean value. Evidence of extra absorption
within the water band would thus appear as a depressed value for this index during transit.
Minor changes of spectrum positioning on the detector, etc., may induce changes in the
time series, we therefore apply a cleaning step of decorrelating the time series variations of
intensity with changes in these external parameters. Figure 2 shows the change of these
over time for Visit 02. The process is: 1) evaluate a linear least-squares fit correlating the
time series during orbits 2 and 5 (outside of transit) only as a function of the 5 external
parameters, then 2) evaluate the model for all times and subtract from the time series in
question.
166 Gilliland
 3.01E+07
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Figure 3: Left panels show the direct (top) and water-band to continuum ratio (bottom)
time series after initial creation. The right panels show the same after the decorrelation
step with parameters shown in Figure 2.
The before and after decorrelation time series for both the direct sum, and water-band
to continuum ratio are shown in Figure 3. Except for the remaining unique behavior of
orbit 1 (expected), the decorrelated time series are much cleaner.
4. Nonlinearity Test
During the planetary transit the direct intensity falls by 1.6%. Since the NICMOS detectors
are known to have small nonlinearities in response to exposure level, and we wish to push
these data to the levels allowed by Poisson statistics (which will be of order 10−5 for the
ratio of in-water-band to continuum during, versus out-of-transit) an independent check of
nonlinearity is advisable. An error of only 10−5/0.016 = 6 × 10−4 in the linearity correc-
tion (differential between pixels within water band and neighboring continua) would be of
concern here.
During the first orbit of each visit we obtained four series of 10 exposures at each of
MCAMRR, NSAMP = 6 and 7 interleaved with the standard STEP1, NSAMP = 4 obser-
vations, thus providing relative exposure times of 1.82, 2.11 and 1.99 seconds respectively.
Figure 4 shows the results of combining data for all of the available test observations to
constrain the linearity. After forming sums in the Water-band normalized to continua as
would be done in the standard observations we find a constraint on the nonlinearity induced
signal at 1.5 × 10−5 ± 1.5× 10−5. This result is consistent with zero and near the limiting
precision available from the primary data to measure the evidence for water in the HD
209458b atmosphere. The linearity correction for count level applied in the pipeline is quite
good for our purposes.
An item requiring future investigation is whether the recently detected nonlinearity
with count rate (“Bohlin” effect) could be a limiting systematic to contend with.
5. Time Series Photometry – Comparison with STIS
Figure 5 shows overplotted results for both STIS (from Brown et al. 2001) and NICMOS
time series. The STIS spectra centered at 600 nm provided a time-series rms of 1.1× 10−4
Differential NICMOS Spectrophotometry at High S/N 167
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Figure 4: Mean of spectra ratios (multiplied by inverse ratio of exposure times at texp =
1.82 to 1.99s and 1.99 to 2.11 s plotted as the thin curve. The overplotted heavy curve
offset from unity simply illustrates the relative count levels over the grism spectra. There
seems to be little if any residual nonlinearity over the spectral domain of interest.
at an 80 s cadence (30% above the Poisson limit for count level of 1.55 × 108 electrons).
Rebinned to 80 seconds the NICMOS photometry provides an rms of 1.8×10−4, about ×2.4
above the Poisson noise limit (2.16 × 108 electrons detected each 80 s). The noise level on
the purely differential index tracking water to continuum bands is closer to being Poisson
limited.
6. Summary
With the current loss of STIS on HST, the NICMOS grisms provide the best spectroscopic
capability for probing atmospheres of extrasolar planets. The presence of broad absorption
features, particularly from water vapor, relative to any similar diagnostics in the optical
would make NICMOS competitive for current advances, even if STIS had not been lost.
The latter of course requires that, like STIS, NICMOS be able to provide data well outside
of its design goals in terms of signal-to-noise and stability.
The analyses discussed here have not yet reached as near fundamental precision limits,
as was the case for STIS. At a time series signal-to-noise of 5,500 per 80 second sum (<
0.0002 rms) for direct photometry summed over the full bandpass, the results are probably
far better than could be obtained from the ground, and will be useful for constraining basic
system parameters through detailed modeling of the transit light curve. Application of
more sophisticated analysis techniques (e.g. difference image analysis) may allow superior
results to still be obtained. For the index of water vapor band to continuum counts the
current results are already closer to fundamental limits on this very bright star, and should
provide interesting constraints on the HD 209458b atmospheric water vapor content.
168 Gilliland
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Figure 5: Shows relative intensity through multiple transits from the STIS observations in
2000 ‘o’, and the NICMOS observations in 2003 ‘*’. The much more rounded bottom to
the transit in the STIS (optical) observations is expected from larger limb darkening in the
optical than in the IR which should (as generally observed) yield a flatter eclipse bottom.
Acknowledgments. I thank Santiago Arribas, Eddie Bergeron, and Tim Brown for
discussion and input on a wide range of topics.
References
Brown, T.M. et al. 2001, ApJ, 552, 699
Brown, T.M. 2001, ApJ, 553, 1006
Charbonneau, D. et al. 2002, ApJ, 568, 377
Gilliland, R.L., and Arribas, S. 2003, Instrument Science Report NICMOS 2003-0
(Baltimore:STScI), available through http://www.stsci.edu/hst/nicmos


Differential NICMOS Spectrophotometry at High S/N

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