SIMLA: The Spitzer Infrared Spectrograph Mapping Legacy Archive
Abstract
We present the Spitzer/IRS Mapping Legacy Archive (SIMLA); a complete set of mid-infrared spectral cubes built from low-resolution mapping-mode fixed-target observations from Spitzer/IRS (5.2-38 micron, R~60-130). Contained in this dataset are spectral maps for several hundred spatially-resolved and unresolved objects, including galaxies, molecular clouds, supernova remnants, HII regions, and more. Each cube has been carefully treated to remove astronomical foregrounds and backgrounds as well as detector effects using a novel pipeline. Cube assembly was facilitated by the CUBISM code, which included automatic detection and removal of bad pixels. We describe the SIMLA pipeline for reducing and validating the cubes, and we show that synthetic photometry derived from SIMLA spectra and corresponding WISE photometry typically agree within a few percent. SIMLA products and documentation related to their use will soon be available at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (DOI:10.26131/IRSA655).
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.12434,
title = {SIMLA: The Spitzer Infrared Spectrograph Mapping Legacy Archive},
author = {Grant P. Donnelly and Cory M. Whitcomb and Lindsey Hands and Sara E. Duval and J. -D. T. Smith and Karin Sandstrom and David Carroll and McKenna Dowd and Brandon S. Hensley and Leslie K. Hunt and Edward Walsh and Julie Watson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.12434},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Accepted by ApJS. 21 pages, 18 figures. Updated to the accepted version