Simulated design trades for a visible-wavelength integral field spectrograph operating behind a space coronagraph

Tyler Baines; Neil T. Zimmerman; Roser Juanola-Parramon; Nicholas Susemiehl; Avi Mandell; Tyler Groff; Michael McElwain; Christopher Stark; Geronimo Villaneuva; Maxime Rizzo

doi:10.1117/12.2630443

27 August 2022 Simulated design trades for a visible-wavelength integral field spectrograph operating behind a space coronagraph

Tyler Baines, Neil T. Zimmerman, Roser Juanola-Parramon, Nicholas Susemiehl, Avi Mandell, Tyler Groff, Michael McElwain, Christopher Stark, Geronimo Villaneuva, Maxime Rizzo

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 12180, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2022: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave; 121805F (2022) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2630443
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2022, Montréal, Québec, Canada

Conference Poster

Abstract

Spectral resolution is one of the key instrument parameters for a future flagship mission aiming to detect and characterize rocky exoplanets. At visible wavelengths, the relatively narrow molecular oxygen A-band absorption feature at 760 nm is one of the driving spectrograph design considerations. We combined numerical models for a segmented space telescope, coronagraph, and lenslet array integral field spectrograph to simulate high-fidelity data products for an Earth-analog exoplanet observed in a 20% bandpass centered on this absorption feature. The simulations were repeated over a set of spectral resolutions, integration times, and noise realizations. The extracted planet spectra were fed into a Bayesian spectral retrieval pipeline. Our nested sampling forward model interpolates over a 6-parameter grid of terrestrial reflectance spectra. For a signal-to-noise ratio per spectral bin of 15, we find modest constraints on the O₂ atmosphere mixing ratio are possible at spectral resolutions R<110, with [16th , 84th] percentile confidence interval [∼ 5%, ∼ 40%] given a true input mixing ratio of 21%. At higher spectral resolutions, for a fixed integration time we find no significant improvement in the confidence interval of the O₂ mixing ratio.

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Tyler Baines, Neil T. Zimmerman, Roser Juanola-Parramon, Nicholas Susemiehl, Avi Mandell, Tyler Groff, Michael McElwain, Christopher Stark, Geronimo Villaneuva, and Maxime Rizzo "Simulated design trades for a visible-wavelength integral field spectrograph operating behind a space coronagraph", Proc. SPIE 12180, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2022: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave, 121805F (27 August 2022); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2630443

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