Speaker
Description
The Euclid mission relies on the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) to deliver high-precision photometric and spectroscopic measurements from the Sun–Earth L2 point. NISP employs a mosaic of 16 H2RG detectors and processes data onboard through a dedicated hardware–software architecture designed to satisfy stringent constraints on computational resources, telemetry bandwidth, and scientific performance. Central to this architecture is the NISP signal estimator, an ad-hoc algorithm that provides flux measurements together with a quality factor (QF) assessing the reliability of the estimation.
This presentation examines the performance of the NISP signal estimator during early flight operations. Results show that, over a wide range of incoming flux, the estimator exhibits a systematic bias well within the instrument noise budget, i.e., lower than 0.01 e/s for 99% of the detector pixels. Finally, this presentation introduces a framework to interpret the QF parameter, exploring its sensitivity to the NISP signal estimator bias, and demonstrating its response to spurious sources, like cosmic rays, snowballs, and persistence signal.