SOXS End-to-End simulator: development and applications for pipeline design

TL;DR

The paper introduces an End-to-End simulator for the SOXS spectroscopic instrument, enabling detailed photon propagation modeling to optimize pipeline development and instrument alignment.

Contribution

It presents a modular, flexible simulation architecture for the SOXS instrument, including synthetic spectral formats and calibration frames for pipeline testing.

Findings

Simulator effectively models photon propagation from target to detector.

Synthetic data aids in pipeline optimization and instrument alignment.

Flexible architecture accommodates various observing conditions.

Abstract

We present the development of the End-to-End simulator for the SOXS instrument at the ESO-NTT 3.5-m telescope. SOXS will be a spectroscopic facility, made by two arms high efficiency spectrographs, able to cover the spectral range 350-2000 nm with resolving power R=4500. The E2E model allows to simulate the propagation of photons starting from the scientific target of interest up to the detectors. The outputs of the simulator are synthetic frames, which will be mainly exploited for optimizing the pipeline development and possibly assisting for proper alignment and integration phases in laboratory and at the telescope. In this paper, we will detail the architecture of the simulator and the computational model, which are strongly characterized by modularity and flexibility. Synthetic spectral formats, related to different seeing and observing conditions, and calibration frames to be ingested by the pipeline are also presented.