Simulating the Exoplanet Atmosphere Detections of Today and Tomorrow with the All-Purpose Carrie Spectrograph Simulator

The detection and characterization of both gaseous and terrestrial exoplanets represents the frontier of exoplanet science. In particular, the performance of new and upcoming telescope/spectrograph combinations in this regime is a topic of great interest to many. However, while the capabilities of new instruments are often modeled well, these efforts are rarely joined with exoplanet analysis codes; as a result, important questions such as “Will ELT spectrographs deliver terrestrial planet detections?” have gone largely unexplored.

We present Carrie: a new, highly flexible spectrograph simulator. Given a number of inputs corresponding to the instrument, telescope, weather, and planet, Carrie calculates the detection significance of the input model. Results from simulations of the WINERED spectrograph in the ultra-hot Jupiter regime will be discussed as well as prospects for detecting smaller planets with ELTs.