Performance of PSG in retrieving exoplanet parameters from JWST data simulated with several tools

Abstract

Abstract Our research explores different methods of utilizing several known tools (petitRADTRANS, PandExo, and PSG) to simulate spectral data acquired by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). We specifically focus on how the choice of method affects the performance of the Planetary Spectrum Generator (PSG) in retrieving exoplanet parameters from such data. To investigate this, we consider the case of exoplanet TOI-1266 c being observed by JWST’s Near Infrared Spectrograph in the Bright Object Time Series mode. Our results show that differences between PSG and PandExo regarding their noise simulation and method of adjusting spectral resolution lead to significant differences in retrieval quality. When utilizing PandExo to simulate noise for non-binned down spectral data, we recommend ensuring that the resolution of the theoretical forward model spectrum input into PandExo closely matches the resolution of the output spectral data, within the same order of magnitude.