Description

The group_scale step rescales pixel values in raw JWST science data products in order to correct for the effect of using a value of NFRAMES for on-board frame averaging that is not a power of 2.

When multiple frames are averaged together on-board into a single group, the sum of the frames is computed and then the sum is divided by the number of frames to compute an average. Division by the number of frames is accomplished by simply bit-shifting the sum by an appropriate number of bits, corresponding to the decimal value of the number of frames. For example, when 2 frames are averaged into a group, the sum is shifted by 1 bit to achieve the equivalent of dividing by 2, and for 8 frames, the sum is shifted by 3 bits. The number of frames that are averaged into a group is recorded in the NFRAMES header keyword in science products and the divisor that was used is recorded in the FRMDIVSR keyword.

This method only results in the correct average when NFRAMES is a power of 2. When NFRAMES is not a power of 2, the next largest divisor is used to perform the averaging. For example, when NFRAMES=5, a divisor of 8 (bit shift of 3) is used to compute the average. This results in averaged values for every group that are too low by the factor NFRAMES/FRMDIVSR.

This step rescales raw pixel values to the correct level by multiplying all groups in all integrations by the factor FRMDIVSR/NFRAMES.

It is assumed that this step will always be applied to raw data before any other processing is done to the pixel values and hence rescaling is applied only to the SCI data array of the input product. It assumes that the ERR array has not yet been populated and hence there’s no need for rescaling that array.

If the step detects that the values of NFRAMES and FRMDIVSR are equal to one another, which means the data were scaled correctly on-board, it skips processing and returns the input data unchanged. In this case, the calibration step status keyword S_GRPSCL will be set to SKIPPED. After successful correction of data that needs to be rescaled, the S_GRPSCL keyword will be set to COMPLETE.