Speaker
Description
Camera systems and their operations need to be planned and tested beforehand in space missions. Furthermore, pipelines producing data products from instruments need to be in place and operating when actual observations start. With this in mind, we are developing a suite of tools for imaging simulation tools for small solar system objects. The immediate use cases are the ESA Hera and Comet Interceptor missions and the VTT hyperspectral camera instrument onboard the missions. The design for our tool is that the direct imaging part is integrated into Blender 3D software and can be used via its integrated Python console. SPICE kernels can be used to give shapes, positions, and attitudes of targets and cameras at a given time. Target materials follow typical reflectance models in planetary sciences. Gas and dust coma can be modeled around the target and its effect on imaging is simulated with volume scattering. Finally, an external Python package can process the images into physical units and simulate a given instrument noise on top including losses from optics and spectral filters and noise components from detector electronics. Therefore, a simulated raw data stream mimicking the one from the actual instrument can be produced for testing with data pipelines. The suite is under active development, and we present some highlighted use cases with Hera and Comet Interceptor missions.