JWST Science Calibration Pipeline

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is one of the most advanced astronomical observatories ever built, designed to explore the universe in unprecedented detail. The JWST Pipeline is a software framework developed to process the raw data captured by the telescope's instruments and transform it into scientifically usable formats. This pipeline plays a critical role in facilitating groundbreaking discoveries, as it corrects instrumental effects, calibrates observations, and extracts meaningful information from raw astronomical data.

Pipeline Workflow

Detailed discussion on the JWST pipeline

Four-stage process

Stage 1 focuses on detector-level corrections, followed by Stage 2 for calibration and alignment, and culminates in Stage 3, where advanced analyses such as photometry and spectroscopy are performed. Researchers and astronomers worldwide rely on this pipeline to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the data used in their studies.

The pipeline is divided into several stages, each tailored to specific aspects of data processing. It starts with stage 0.

This stage is handled by the Science Data Processing (SDP) system, which processes raw telemetry downloaded from the spacecraft. Key metadata, such as observation details and spacecraft information, are populated into the data files. The outputs are uncalibrated raw data products, typically saved as "*uncal.fits" files. These files are the starting point for offline processing and contain 4-dimensional data representing detector pixel values across integrations and groups.