Calibrating Photometric Redshift Measurements with the Multi-channel Imager (MCI) of the China Space Station Telescope (CSST)

Abstract The China Space Station Telescope (CSST) photometric survey aims to perform a high spatial resolution (∼0.″15) photometric imaging for the targets that cover a large sky area (∼17,500 deg 2 ) and wide wavelength range (from NUV to NIR). It expects to explore the properties of dark matter, dark energy, and other important cosmological and astronomical areas. In this work, we evaluate whether the filter design of the Multi-channel Imager (MCI), one of the five instruments of the CSST, can provide accurate photometric redshift (photo z ) measurements with its nine medium-band filters to meet the relevant scientific objectives. We generate the mock data based on the COSMOS photometric redshift catalog with astrophysical and instrumental effects. The application of upper limit information of low signal-to-noise ratio data is adopted in the estimation of photo z . We investigate the dependency of photo z accuracy on the filter parameters, such as band position and width. We find that the current MCI filter design can achieve good photo z measurements with accuracy σ z ≃ 0.017 and outlier fraction f c ≃ 2.2%. It can effectively improve the photo z measurements of the main CSST survey using the Survey Camera to an accuracy σ z ≃ 0.015 and outlier fraction f c ≃ 1.5%. This indicates that the original MCI filters are proper for the photo z calibration.