TY - JOUR
T1 - Colorado ultraviolet transit experiment data simulator
AU - Sreejith, Aickara Gopinathan
AU - Fossati, Luca
AU - Fleming, Brian T.
AU - France, Kevin
AU - Koskinen, Tommi
AU - Egan, Arika
AU - Rüdisser, Hannah T.
AU - Steller, Manfred
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors acknowledge the financial support from the Austrian Forschun gsförderungsgesellschaft FFG project “ACUTEDIRNDL” P859718 and “CONTROL” P865968. CUTE is supported by NASA grant NNX17AI84G (PI—K. France) to the University of Colorado Boulder, CO, USA. They thank the anonymous referees for their valuable comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).
PY - 2019/1/1
Y1 - 2019/1/1
N2 - The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE) is a 6U NASA CubeSat carrying on board a low-resolution (R ~ 2000 to 3000), near-UV (2500 to 3300 Å) spectrograph. It has a rectangular primary Cassegrain telescope to maximize the collecting area. CUTE, which is planned for launch in spring 2020, is designed to monitor transiting extra-solar planets orbiting bright, nearby stars, aiming at improving our understanding of planet atmospheric escape and star-planet interaction processes. We present here the CUTE data simulator, which we complemented with a basic data reduction pipeline. This pipeline will be then updated once the final CUTE data reduction pipeline is developed. We show here the application of the simulator to the HD209458 system and a first estimate of the precision on the measurement of the transit depth as a function of temperature and magnitude of the host star. We also present estimates of the effect of spacecraft jitter on the final spectral resolution. The simulator has been developed considering also scalability and adaptability to other missions carrying on board a long-slit spectrograph. The data simulator will be used to inform the CUTE target selection, choose the spacecraft and instrument settings for each observation, and construct synthetic CUTE wavelength-dependent transit light curves on which to develop the CUTE data reduction pipeline.
AB - The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE) is a 6U NASA CubeSat carrying on board a low-resolution (R ~ 2000 to 3000), near-UV (2500 to 3300 Å) spectrograph. It has a rectangular primary Cassegrain telescope to maximize the collecting area. CUTE, which is planned for launch in spring 2020, is designed to monitor transiting extra-solar planets orbiting bright, nearby stars, aiming at improving our understanding of planet atmospheric escape and star-planet interaction processes. We present here the CUTE data simulator, which we complemented with a basic data reduction pipeline. This pipeline will be then updated once the final CUTE data reduction pipeline is developed. We show here the application of the simulator to the HD209458 system and a first estimate of the precision on the measurement of the transit depth as a function of temperature and magnitude of the host star. We also present estimates of the effect of spacecraft jitter on the final spectral resolution. The simulator has been developed considering also scalability and adaptability to other missions carrying on board a long-slit spectrograph. The data simulator will be used to inform the CUTE target selection, choose the spacecraft and instrument settings for each observation, and construct synthetic CUTE wavelength-dependent transit light curves on which to develop the CUTE data reduction pipeline.
KW - CCD
KW - CubeSat
KW - data simulator
KW - exoplanet
KW - ultraviolet spectrograph
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U2 - 10.1117/1.JATIS.5.1.018004
DO - 10.1117/1.JATIS.5.1.018004
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85064251124
VL - 5
JO - Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems
JF - Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems
SN - 2329-4124
IS - 1
M1 - 018004
ER -