AORs

Science Pipeline

If you are designing sequences via SPOT, then by default your data will flow through the IRAC science pipeline. This pipeline does the steps that one would expect for any generic science data: dark-subtraction, flat-fielding, pointing assignment, flux calibration, etc. The output will be a BCD image and it's associated files. If this is what you want, then you don't need to do anything special.

If you do want your data to flow through the two existing calibration pipelines, then you do need to do something extra. The two cases are:

IRAC Sky Dark Pipeline

This will take the data and put it through a pipeline that makes an IRAC sky dark image. The output will be a dark image for each channel. If you want this to happen to the data, then you must give the AOR an AOR label that starts with "skydrk_". The AOR label is the title that you give the AOR in SPOT, and in the .aor file it will show up as a line like "AOR_LABEL: skydrk_12sec". It doesn't matter what comes after the underscore, as long as the first 7 characters are "skydrk_".

The AOR label in the .aor file.

The AOR label location in SPOT

IRAC Sky Flat Pipeline

The other alternative is the flatfield thread, which builds a median sky flat. For this, you must use an AOR label of "skyflt_".

Notes

In principle there would also be an automated LINCAL thread for deriving the linearity coefficients, but it currently does not exist. If it comes back into being then I will tell you the reserved keywords for it. What will physically happen is that the "exposure type" will be changed in our database from "sci" (the default for all data taken via an AOR) to "drk" or "flt". These exposure types are then used to trigger the appropriate pipelines. Here is the actual table used to do the conversion.

IERs

For IERs you manually set the exposure type in SPOTIER. The exposure types for the pipelines are "sci", "drk", and "flt". Choosing any of the other options in SPOTIER will cause the data to be archived but no further processing will occur, as there are no appropriate pipelines to act on them.