Information Content Approach to Trade Studies for SCALES

TL;DR

This paper presents an information content approach to evaluate how design variations in the SCALES instrument affect its ability to detect and characterize cold exoplanets through realistic simulations and systematic analysis.

Contribution

It introduces an information content methodology to quantify the impact of design changes on SCALES' performance in exoplanet detection and characterization.

Findings

Optomechanical tolerances are constrained by science requirements.

Detector electronic specifications are critical for signal recovery.

Design updates significantly influence the instrument's detection capabilities.

Abstract

The advantage of having a high-fidelity instrument simulation tool developed in tandem with novel instrumentation is having the ability to investigate, in isolation and in combination, the wide parameter space set by the instrument design. SCALES, the third generation thermal-infrared diffraction limited imager and low/med-resolution integral field spectrograph being designed for Keck, is an instrument unique in design in order to optimize for its driving science case of direct detection and characterization of thermal emission from cold exoplanets. This warranted an end-to-end simulation tool that systematically produces realistic mock data from SCALES to probe the recovery of injected signals under changes in instrument design parameters. In this paper, we quantify optomechanical tolerance and detector electronic requirements set by the fiducial science cases using information content analysis, and test the consequences of updates to the design of the instrument on meeting these requirements.