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The Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph for the James Webb Space Telescope. I. Instrument Overview and In-flight Performance

Doyon, René,C. Willott,J. Hutchings,A. Sivaramakrishnan,L. Albert,D. Lafrèniere,N. Rowlands,M. B. Vila,A. Martel,S. LaMassa,D. Aldridge,É. Artigau,P. Cameron,P. Chayer,N. Cook,Rachel A. Cooper,A. Darveau-Bernier,J. Dupuis,Colin Earnshaw,N. Espinoza,J. Filippazzo,A. Fullerton,D. Gaudreau,Roman Gawlik,P. Goudfrooij,C. Haley,J. Kammerer,D. Kendall,S. Lambros,L. Ignat,M. Maszkiewicz,Ashley McColgan,T. Morishita,N. Ouellette,C. Pacifici,Natasha Philippi,M. Radica,S. Ravindranath,J. Rowe,Arpita Roy,Niladri Roy,K. Saad,S. Sohn,G. Talens,D. Touahri,Deepashri Thatte,Joanna M. Taylor,T. Vandal,K. Volk,M. Wander,Gerry Warner,Sheng-hai Zheng,Julia Zhou,R. Abraham,M. Beaulieu,B. Benneke,L. Ferrarese,R. Jayawardhana,D. Johnstone,L. Kaltenegger,Michael R. Meyer,J. Pipher,J. Rameau,M. Rieke,Salma Salhi,M. Sawicki

Published 2023 in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

ABSTRACT

The Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) is the science module of the Canadian-built Fine Guidance Sensor onboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). NIRISS has four observing modes: (1) broadband imaging featuring seven of the eight NIRCam broadband filters, (2) wide-field slitless spectroscopy at a resolving power of ∼150 between 0.8 and 2.2 μm, (3) single-object cross-dispersed slitless spectroscopy (SOSS) enabling simultaneous wavelength coverage between 0.6 and 2.8 μm at R ∼ 700, a mode optimized for exoplanet spectroscopy of relatively bright (J < 6.3) stars and (4) aperture masking interferometry (AMI) between 2.8 and 4.8 μm enabling high-contrast (∼10−3 − 10−4) imaging at angular separations between 70 and 400 mas for relatively bright (M < 8) sources. This paper presents an overview of the NIRISS instrument, its design, its scientific capabilities, and a summary of in-flight performance. NIRISS shows significantly better response shortward of ∼2.5 μm resulting in 10%–40% sensitivity improvement for broadband and low-resolution spectroscopy compared to pre-flight predictions. Two time-series observations performed during instrument commissioning in the SOSS mode yield very stable spectro-photometry performance within ∼10% of the expected noise. The first space-based companion detection of the tight binary star AB Dor AC through AMI was demonstrated.

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