Abstract
Atmospheric spectroscopy of extrasolar planets is an intricate business. Atmospheric signatures typically require a photometric precision of $1 \times 10^{-4}$ in flux over several hours. Such precision demands high instrument stability as well as an understanding of stellar variability and an optimal data reduction and removal of systematic noise. In the context of the EChO mission concept, we here discuss the data reduction and analysis pipeline developed for the EChO end-to-end simulator EChOSim. We present and discuss the step by step procedures required in order to obtain the final exoplanetary spectrum from the EChOSim`raw data' using a simulated observation of the secondary eclipse of the hot-Neptune 55 Cnc e.
Highlights
Recent successes in characterisation of extrasolar planets are always tales of characterising the instrument response function to an unprecedented detail
The EChOSim data pipeline is a stand-alone software custom built for EChOSim but with easy adaptability to other instruments and data sets in mind
The EChOSim-DP is a stand-alone package delivered with the EChOSim code but can be adapted to observations produced by any spectrograph
Summary
Recent successes in characterisation of extrasolar planets are always tales of characterising the instrument response function to an unprecedented detail. Exp Astron (2015) 40:639–654 needs to simulate the full observational and data analysis chain in order to gauge the impact the instrument concept has on the achievable error bar of the detection. Such a feat requires an advanced mission end-to-end simulator as well as an advanced data analysis pipeline. The depth of the resulting lightcurve allows us to estimate the planetary radius (given the stellar radius is known). This we refer to as transit (or primary eclipse) observation. The study of transmission and emission spectroscopy is a well established field for both space and ground based observations of exoplanetary atmospheres (e.g. [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23] see [24] for a comprehensive review)
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