A New Method for Calibration of Gain Variation in Detector System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel calibration method using densified pupil spectroscopy to improve spectro-photometric accuracy in transit spectroscopy, enabling detection of atmospheric features of habitable exoplanets.

Contribution

The paper presents a new calibration concept that reduces detector time-variation effects, enhancing measurement precision in space-based transit spectroscopy.

Findings

Nearly photon-noise-limited performance achieved

Detects atmospheric absorption features in terrestrial exoplanets

Effective calibration reduces detector variation impact

Abstract

Transit spectroscopy of habitable planets orbiting late-type stars requires high relative spectro-photometric accuracy between wavelengths during transit/eclipse observation. The spectro-photometric signal is not affected only by image movement and deformation due to wavefront error but also by electrical variation in the detector system. These time-variation components, coupled to the transit signal, distort the measurements of atmospheric composition in transit spectroscopy. Here we propose a new concept for improvement of spectro-photometric accuracy through the calibration of the time-variation components in the detector system by developing densified pupil spectroscopy that provides multiple spectra of the star-planet system. Owing to a group of pixels exposed by the object light (i.e., science pixels), pixel-to-pixel variations can be smoothed out through an averaging operation, thus only common time-variation components over the science pixels remain. In addition, considering that the detector plane is optically conjugated to the pupil plane, a pupil mask can completely block astronomical light incoming into residual pixels. The common time-variation components are reconstructed with the residual pixels and reduced into a random term. Applying the densified pupil spectrograph with a mid-infrared detector system to a large space cryogenic telescope such as the Origins Space Telescope, we show that the system nearly achieves photon-noise-limited performance and detects absorption features through transmission spectroscopy and secondary eclipse of terrestrial planets orbiting M-type stars at 10 pc with 60 transit observations. Thus, the proposed method contributes to the measurement of planetary habitability and biosignatures of the nearby transiting habitable candidates.