K2P\(^2\) \(-\) A photometry pipeline for the K2 mission

Abstract

With the loss of a second reaction wheel, resulting in the inability to point continuously and stably at the same field of view, the NASA Kepler satellite recently entered a new mode of observation known as the K2 mission. The data from this redesigned mission present a specific challenge; the targets systematically drift in position on a ~6 hour time scale, inducing a significant instrumental signal in the photometric time series --- this greatly impacts the ability to detect planetary signals and perform asteroseismic analysis. Here we detail our version of a reduction pipeline for K2 target pixel data, which automatically: defines masks for all targets in a given frame; extracts the target's flux- and position time series; corrects the time series based on the apparent movement on the CCD (either in 1D or 2D) combined with the correction of instrumental and/or planetary signals via the KASOC filter (Handberg & Lund 2014), thus rendering the time series ready for asteroseismic analysis; computes power spectra for all targets, and identifies potential contaminations between targets. From a test of our pipeline on a sample of targets from the K2 campaign 0, the recovery of data for multiple targets increases the amount of potential light curves by a factor \({\geq}10\). Our pipeline could be applied to the upcoming TESS (Ricker et al. 2014) and PLATO 2.0 (Rauer et al. 2013) missions.