Empirical Validation of a New Data Product from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer Satellite

Abstract

Since 2008, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite has been gathering data on heliospheric energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) while being exposed to various sources of background noise, such as cosmic rays and solar energetic particles. The IBEX mission initially released only a qualified triple-coincidence (qABC) data product, which was designed to provide observations of ENAs free of background contamination. Further measurements revealed that the qABC data was in fact susceptible to contamination, having relatively low ENA counts and high background rates. Recently, the mission team considered releasing a certain qualified double-coincidence (qBC) data product, which has roughly twice the detection rate of the qABC data product. This paper presents a simulation-based validation of the new qBC data product against the already-released qABC data product. The results show that the qBCs can plausibly be said to share the same signal rate as the qABCs up to an average absolute deviation of 3.6%. Visual diagnostics at an orbit, map, and full mission level provide additional confirmation of signal rate coherence across data products. These approaches are generalizable to other scenarios in which one wishes to test whether multiple observations could plausibly be generated by some underlying shared signal.