Exoplanets are abundant in our galaxy and yet characterizing them remains a technical challenge. Solar System planets provide an opportunity to test the practical limitations of exoplanet observations with high signal-to-noise data that we cannot access for exoplanets. However, data on Solar System planets differ from exoplanets in that Solar System planets are spatially resolved while exoplanets are unresolved point-sources. We present a novel instrument designed to observe Solar System planets as though they are exoplanets, the Planet as Exoplanet Analog Spectrograph (PEAS). PEAS consists of a dedicated 0.5-m telescope and off-the-shelf optics, located at Lick Observatory. PEAS uses an integrating sphere to disk-integrate light from the Solar System planets, producing spatially mixed light more similar to the spectra we can obtain from exoplanets. This paper describes the general system design and early results of the PEAS instrument.
@article{arxiv.2012.08675,
title = {The Planet as Exoplanet Analog Spectrograph (PEAS): Design and First-Light},
author = {Emily C. Martin and Andrew J. Skemer and Matthew V. Radovan and Steven L. Allen and David Black and William T. S. Deich and Jonathan J. Fortney and Gabriel Kruglikov and Nicholas MacDonald and David Marques and Evan C. Morris and Andrew C. Phillips and Dale Sandford and Julissa Villalobos Valencia and Jason J. Wang and Pavl Zachary},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.08675},
year = {2020}
}