Recovering simulated planet and disk signals using SCALES aperture masking

Kavli Affiliate: Bruce Macintosh

| First 5 Authors: Mackenzie Lach, Steph Sallum, Ravinder Banyal, Natalie Batalha, Geoff Blake

| Summary:

The Slicer Combined with Array of Lenslets for Exoplanet Spectroscopy
(SCALES) instrument is a lenslet-based integral field spectrograph that will
operate at 2 to 5 microns, imaging and characterizing colder (and thus older)
planets than current high-contrast instruments. Its spatial resolution for
distant science targets and/or close-in disks and companions could be improved
via interferometric techniques such as sparse aperture masking. We introduce a
nascent Python package, NRM-artist, that we use to design several SCALES masks
to be non-redundant and to have uniform coverage in Fourier space. We generate
high-fidelity mock SCALES data using the scalessim package for SCALES’ low
spectral resolution modes across its 2 to 5 micron bandpass. We include
realistic noise from astrophysical and instrument sources, including Keck
adaptive optics and Poisson noise. We inject planet and disk signals into the
mock datasets and subsequently recover them to test the performance of SCALES
sparse aperture masking and to determine the sensitivity of various mask
designs to different science signals.

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