The James Webb Space Telescope Data Calibration Pipeline

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and is currently expected to be launched in late 2018. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is developing the software systems that will be used to provide routine calibration of the science data received from JWST. The calibration operations use a processing environment provided by a Python module called stpipe that provides many common services to each calibration step, relieving step developers from having to implement such functionality. The stpipe module provides common configuration handling, parameter validation and persistence, and I/O management.

Individual steps are written as Python classes that can be invoked individually from within Python or from the stpipe command line. Any set of step classes can be configured into a pipeline, with stpipe handling the flow of data between steps. The stpipe environment includes the use of standard data models. The data models, defined using json schema, provide a means of validating the correct format of the data files presented to the pipeline, as well as presenting an abstract interface to isolate the calibration steps from details of how the data are stored on disk.