Abstract
Abstract Wayne is an algorithm that simulates Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) grism spectroscopic frames, including sources of noise and systematics. It can simulate both staring and spatial scan modes, and observations such as the transit and the eclipse of an exoplanet. Unlike many other instrument simulators, the focus of Wayne is on creating frames with realistic systematics in order to test the effectiveness of different data analysis methods in a variety of different scenarios. This approach is critical for method validation and optimizing observing strategies. In this paper we describe the implementation of Wayne for WFC3 in the near-infrared channel with the G102 and G141 grisms. We compare the simulations to real data obtained for the exoplanet HD 209458b, to verify the accuracy of the simulation. The software is now available as open source at github.com/ucl-exoplanets/wayne.
Highlights
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been invaluable for exoplanetary science
Here we describe the implementation of Wayne, a simulator for Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) IR spectroscopy in both the G102 and G141 grisms
We demonstrate the accuracy of our simulation by replicating the real observation of HD 209458b from HST proposal 12181 and process it using the same pipeline described in Tsiaras et al (2016b)
Summary
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been invaluable for exoplanetary science. The STIS spectrograph was first used for time-series photometry of HD 209458b (Brown et al 2001) and for the first measurement of an exoplanet atmosphere with transmission spectroscopy (Charbonneau et al 2002). While WFC3 has been successfully used, as with any instrument it presents some unique challenges for data analysis This is true when used in spatial scan mode for exoplanet transit and eclipse spectroscopy, which is the focus of our paper. A typical transit event observed by HST lasts around one to four hours, meaning an observation must span multiple orbits, as a single target is only continuously visible for ∼ 45 minutes. This time includes overheads such as acquiring and re-acquiring the guide star (6 and 5 minutes, respectively, Dressel 2016) and buffer dumps. Buffer dumps are generally required when taking many short exposures (usually one or two dumps per orbit for staring data), and lower the overall efficiency of an observation
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