THE DATA REDUCTION PIPELINE FOR THE SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU GALAXY SURVEY
- 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
- et al.
Abstract
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 3622-10354 A and an average footprint of ∼500 arcsec2 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 algorithms and centralized metadata framework that produce sky-subtracted spectrophotometrically calibrated spectra and rectified three-dimensional 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, we demonstrate that the MaNGA data have nearly Poisson-limited sky subtraction shortward of ∼8500 A and reach a typical 10σ limiting continuum surface brightness μ = 23.5 AB arcsec-2 in a five-arcsecond-diameter aperture in the g-band. The wavelength calibration of the MaNGA data is accurate to 5 km s-1 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 σ = 72 km s-1.