The Quality Control Group in Garching provides quality checks of the VIMOS data. These checks are part of the Quality Control (QC) process. They are executed on raw data as well as on pipeline-processed data.

The QC checks consist of

• Quality Control Level 0 (QC0),
• Quality Control Level 1 (QC1),
• trending.

QC0 involves checks whether the user-defined observational constraints have been respected during the observation. The QC0 checks are done on raw data.

The SM observer receives a QC0 report which lists all the programme-specific science files, their user-defined constraints (as read from the OB Repository which was filled from P2PP), and the actual QC0 parameters during observation (as read from the Ambient Database which is fed from the Ambient Site Monitor).

The data are checked for the following constraints:

• airmass,
• moon distance,
• fractional lunar illumination (FLI),
• seeing.

Find more information about QC0 reports here.

Quality Control Level 1 consists of quality checks on pipeline-processed data.

The QC1 parameters are either provided by the VIMOS pipeline or measured by post-pipeline procedures, on master calibration and reduced files. The purpose of measuring QC1 parameters is:

• to assess the quality of calibration products (e.g. noise properties, dispersion solution),
• to compare with expected/nominal values (e.g. resolution),
• to assess the performance of the instrument (e.g. efficiency),
• to monitor efficiency of master creation process (e.g. reduction of random noise).

The result of the QC1 process is used to

• decide whether master creation data are certified or rejected,
• assess the quality of the reduction process.
  

All master calibration data created by QC Garching are quality-checked. Apart from measuring QC1 parameters, these files are also checked for "unusual" effects like overexposure, misalignment of gratings etc.

For the moment, the QC1 data are internally used for decision making and building a trending database. It is planned to provide them as part of the SM package, as well as store them in the Science Archive.

Find more details about QC1 parameters and trending here.

Trending is monitoring QC1 parameters over time (e.g. effective resolution as function of time). Investigating the mutual relations of QC1 parameters is also part of trending. E.g., plotting vertical shifts of formatcheck files versus temperature checks for thermal and non-thermal drifts of the gratings.

Main results are:

• monitor instrument health,
• detect long-term trends,
• detect sudden changes (e.g. misalignment of gratings).

Find more details about QC1 parameters and trending here.