The Slicer Combined with Array of Lenslets for Exoplanet Spectroscopy (SCALES) instrument is a lenslet-based integral field spectrograph that will operate at 2 to 5 microns, imaging and characterizing colder (and thus older) planets than current high-contrast instruments. Its spatial resolution for distant science targets and/or close-in disks and companions could be improved via interferometric techniques such as sparse aperture masking. We introduce a nascent Python package, NRM-artist, that we use to design several SCALES masks to be non-redundant and to have uniform coverage in Fourier space. We generate high-fidelity mock SCALES data using the scalessim package for SCALES' low spectral resolution modes across its 2 to 5 micron bandpass. We include realistic noise from astrophysical and instrument sources, including Keck adaptive optics and Poisson noise. We inject planet and disk signals into the mock datasets and subsequently recover them to test the performance of SCALES sparse aperture masking and to determine the sensitivity of various mask designs to different science signals.
@article{arxiv.2310.12483,
title = {Recovering simulated planet and disk signals using SCALES aperture masking},
author = {Mackenzie Lach and Steph Sallum and Ravinder Banyal and Natalie Batalha and Geoff Blake and Tim Brandt and Zackery Briesemeister and Aditi Desai and Josh Eisner and Wen-fai Fong and Tom Greene and Mitsuhiko Honda and Isabel Kain and Charlie Kilpatrick and Katherine de Kleer and Michael Liu and Bruce Macintosh and Raquel Martinez and Dimitri Mawet and Brittany Miles and Caroline Morley and Imke de Pater and Diana Powell and Patrick Sheehan and Andrew Skemer and Justin Spilker and Deno Stelter and Jordan Stone and Arun Surya and Sivarani Thirupathi and Kevin Wagner and Yifan Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.12483},
year = {2023}
}