SOFIA+FORCAST Lunar Legacy Project Processing Procedure

Abstract

Abstract The aim of the Lunar Legacy Project is to map the distribution of water on the Moon’s surface through the detection and characterization of the 6 μm spectral band indicative of molecular water. Spectra were taken with the Faint Object infraRed Camera for the SOFIA Telescope instrument on the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) between 2018 and 2022. This paper describes the processing steps necessary to reduce the raw data downloaded from the SOFIA archive to create flux-calibrated spectra. The reduction mostly requires the SOFIA Redux package which can be downloaded from the SOFIA website, and some steps in the process require scripts written by our team in Python.