The BRITE nano-satellite mission is an international Austrian-Canadian-Polish project of six small space tele- scopes measuring photometric variability of the brightest stars in the sky. Due to the limited space onboard and the weight constraints, the CCD detectors are poorly shielded and suffer from proton impact. Shortly after the launch, various CCD defects emerged, producing various sources of impulsive noise in the images. In this paper, the methods of BRITE data-processing are described and their efficiency evaluated. The proposed algorithm, developed by the BRITE photometric team, consists of three main parts: (1) image classification, (2) image processing with aperture photometry and (3) tunable optimization of parameters. The presented pipeline allows one to achieve milli-magnitude precision in photometry. Some first scientific results of the mission have just been published.

Date Published: 29 July 2016
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9904, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2016: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave, 99041R (29 July 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2229141

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9904:
Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2016: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave
Howard A. MacEwen; Giovanni G. Fazio; Makenzie Lystrup; Natalie Batalha; Nicholas Siegler; Edward C. Tong, Editor(s)