The Data Reduction Pipeline for the SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU Galaxy Survey

• Published in: arXiv.org 2016-08
• Main Authors: Law, David R, Cherinka, Brian, Yan, Renbin, Andrews, Brett H, Bershady, Matthew A, Bizyaev, Dmitry, Blanc, Guillermo A, Blanton, Michael R, Bolton, Adam S, Brownstein, Joel R, Bundy, Kevin, Chen, Yanmei, Drory, Niv, D'Souza, Richard, Fu, Hai, Jones, Amy, Kauffmann, Guinevere, MacDonald, Nicholas, Masters, Karen L, Newman, Jeffrey A, Parejko, John K, Sánchez-Gallego, José R, Sánchez, Sebastian F, Schlegel, David J, Thomas, Daniel, Wake, David A, Weijmans, Anne-Marie, Westfall, Kyle B, Zhang, Kai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Apertures; Calibration; Cubes; Data reduction; Data transmission; Galaxies; Mapping; Optical fibers; Red shift; Sky surveys (astronomy); Spatial resolution; Spectra; Spectral resolution; Spectrophotometry; Stars & galaxies; Subtraction; Surface brightness
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1607.08619

Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) is an optical fiber-bundle integral-field unit (IFU) spectroscopic survey that is one of three core programs in the fourth-generation Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV). With a spectral coverage of 3622 - 10,354 Angstroms and an average footprint of ~ 500 arcsec^2 per IFU the scientific data products derived from MaNGA will permit exploration of the internal structure of a statistically large sample of 10,000 low redshift galaxies in unprecedented detail. Comprising 174 individually pluggable science and calibration IFUs with a near-constant data stream, MaNGA is expected to obtain ~ 100 million raw-frame spectra and ~ 10 million reduced galaxy spectra over the six-year lifetime of the survey. In this contribution, we describe the MaNGA Data Reduction Pipeline (DRP) algorithms and centralized metadata framework that produces sky-subtracted, spectrophotometrically calibrated spectra and rectified 3-D data cubes that combine individual dithered observations. For the 1390 galaxy data cubes released in Summer 2016 as part of SDSS-IV Data Release 13 (DR13), we demonstrate that the MaNGA data have nearly Poisson-limited sky subtraction shortward of ~ 8500 Angstroms and reach a typical 10-sigma limiting continuum surface brightness mu = 23.5 AB/arcsec^2 in a five arcsec diameter aperture in the g band. The wavelength calibration of the MaNGA data is accurate to 5 km/s rms, with a median spatial resolution of 2.54 arcsec FWHM (1.8 kpc at the median redshift of 0.037) and a median spectral resolution of sigma = 72 km/s.