Kavli Affiliate: James J. Bock
| First 5 Authors: Brendan P. Crill, Yoonsoo P. Bach, Sean A. Bryan, Jean Choppin de Janvry, Ari J. Cukierman
| Summary:
We describe the SPHEREx Sky Simulator, a software tool designed to model
science data for NASA’s SPHEREx mission that will carry out a series of all-sky
spectrophotometric surveys at $sim$6” spatial resolution in 102 spectral
channels spanning 0.75 to 5 $mu$m. The Simulator software implements models
for astrophysical emission, instrument characteristics, and survey strategy to
generate realistic infrared sky scenes as they will be observed by SPHEREx. The
simulated data includes a variety of realistic noise and systematic effects
that are estimated using up-to-date astrophysical measurements and information
from pre-launch instrument characterization campaigns. Through the pre-flight
mission phases the Simulator has been critical in predicting the impact of
various effects on SPHEREx science performance, and has played an important
role guiding the development of the SPHEREx data analysis pipeline. In this
paper, we describe the skysim architecture, pre-flight instrument and sky
models, and summarize high-level predictions from the Simulator, including a
pre-launch prediction for the 5$sigma$ point source sensitivity of SPHEREx,
which we estimate to be $m_{rm AB}$ 18.5–19 from 0.75 to 3.8~$mu$m and
$m_{rm AB}$ 16.6–18 from 3.8 to 5 $mu$m, with the sensitivity limited by the
zodiacal light background at all wavelengths. In the future, on-orbit data will
be used to improve the Simulator, which will form the basis of a variety of
forward-modeling tools that will be used to model myriad instrumental and
astrophysical processes to characterize their systematic effects on our final
data products and analyses.
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