Memory-Efficient Up-the-Ramp Processing with Cosmic-Ray Rejection

We introduce a memory-efficient method for processing up-the-ramp sampled data to reduce noise and remove cosmic-ray events. The method we describe includes initial processing in the readout electronics (onboard, in the case of a space mission) plus postprocessing downstream. This data processing approach can be used to record or downlink high-quality science data using a small fraction of the bits required to transmit the full data, potentially reducing the volume to 0.01–0.001 of its original size. The onboard component has the advantage that it “processes as you go,” reducing the online memory requirements. The processing and memory requirements are modest and are within the scope of current-generation avionics systems. We discuss the requirements and the performance of the algorithm. We also demonstrate the quality of the resulting data.