Work

A new method of deriving Doppler velocities for Solar Orbiter SPICE

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: This paper presents a follow-up to previous work on correcting point-spread-function (PSF)-induced Doppler artifacts in observations by the SPICE spectrograph on Solar Orbiter. In a previous paper, we demonstrated the correction of these artifacts in the y − λ plane with PSF regularization, treating the forward problem with a method based on large sparse matrix inversion. It has since been found that similar apparent artifacts are also present in the x − λ direction, i.e., across adjacent slit positions. Correcting this is difficult (although not impossible) with the previous matrix inversion method due to the time variation between slit positions. We have therefore devised a new method that addresses both x − λ and y − λ artifacts simultaneously by applying wavelength-dependent shifts at each x − y plane of the spectral cube. This paper demonstrates the SPICE data issue, describes the new method, and shows a comparison with the previous one. We explore the time variation of the correction parameters for the SPICE data and show a clear orbit dependence. The results of the method are significantly higher-quality Doppler signals, which we estimate at less than ∼5 km/s uncertainty for brighter lines in the absence of other systematics. Furthermore, we show the new SPICE polar observation results as a demonstration. The correction codes are written in Python, publicly available on GitHub, and can be directly applied to SPICE level 2 datasets.

Source: Astronomy and Astrophysics

DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202555756