JWST Project - Instrument Performance Simulator of the NIRSpec Spectrograph

摘要

The future James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), developed jointly by the American, European and Canadian space agencies (NASA, ESA and CSA), is scheduled for launch in 2013. The near-infrared spectrograph NIRSpec will be a major element of its instrument suite and is built by EADS Astrium for ESA. NIRSpec is a multi-object spectrograph allowing astronomers to obtain the spectra of more than one hundred objects in one shot. Given the complexity of the NIRSpec instrument, it was found necessary to develop an instrument performance simulator (IPS) software. In this context, the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (CRAL) is responsible of the development of this simulator that will serve as a basis for early performance verification purposes; provide inputs and support for the verification and calibration campaigns, as well as for the development of the instrument calibration, target acquisition and data reduction procedures. In this paper, we will present this IPS software that will be able to generate simulated NIRSpec detector exposures for the various modes of the instrument (multi-object, integral field unit, fixed slits) and for a large variety of situations (test, calibration, scientific observations).