Optical performance budgeting for JDEM weak-lensing measurements

Charley Noecker

doi:10.1117/12.857744

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5 August 2010 Optical performance budgeting for JDEM weak-lensing measurements

Charley Noecker

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Proceedings Volume 7731, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2010: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave; 77311E (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.857744
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2010, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Weak gravitational lensing of galaxies is a versatile probe of the distribution of gravitating matter, both visible and invisible, and the influence of cosmological dark energy on that distribution for z<1.5. The weak lensing method is under consideration as an element of NASA-DOE Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM). The measurements are challenging, because of an ambitious goal for sensitivity to feeble gravitational shear and a competing goal for an extremely large statistical sample of galaxies. This motivates an instrument design which has very few pixels across each galaxy image and yet must extract galaxy shape information with very high precision and accuracy. This in turn places stiff requirements on calibration during observations and on instrument stability. We present a tool for estimating the impact of telescope and detector physics on the estimated lensing shear, in a way that permits us to propagate the instrument performance allocations all the way to bias uncertainties in gravitational shear. This tool can be validated against integrated modeling, and would allow powerful capability for system engineering trades.

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Charley Noecker "Optical performance budgeting for JDEM weak-lensing measurements", Proc. SPIE 7731, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2010: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave, 77311E (5 August 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.857744

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