Gerónimo Villanueva (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) talks about “the Planetary Spectrum Generator (PSG): a comprehensive modeling and retrieval tool”.
“The Planetary Spectrum Generator (PSG) is an online radiative-transfer suite (https://psg.gsfc.nasa.gov) applicable to a broad range of planets, comets, asteroids, small-bodies and exoplanets, which is now widely used by the planetary community, with up to 1 million hits/month. PSG can synthesize planetary spectra (atmospheres and surfaces) for a broad range of wavelengths (0.1 μm to 100 mm, UV/Vis/near-IR/IR/far-IR/THz/sub-mm/Radio) from any telescope, observatory, orbiter or rover. This is achieved by combining several state-of-the-art radiative transfer models, spectroscopic databases and planetary climatological models. PSG has three-dimensional orbital calculator for all objects in the solar-system and confirmed exoplanets, while the radiative-transfer models can ingest billions of spectral lines from hundreds of species from several spectroscopic repositories. It integrates the latest radiative-transfer and scattering methods in order to compute high resolution spectra via line-by-line calculations, and utilizes the efficient correlated-k method at moderate resolutions. PSG includes a realistic noise calculator that integrates several telescope / instrument configurations (e.g., interferometry, coronagraphs) and detector technologies (e.g., CCD, heterodyne detectors, bolometers). PSG also includes a robust 3D climate module (GlobES), permitting to compute exoplanetary spectra and phase curves by ingesting a broad range of climatological data. Beyond the computation of spectra, PSG has also an advanced retrieval package implementing two advanced methods: optimal estimation and an efficient nested sampling Bayesian framework. In this presentation, I will present the latest developments and applications of the tool.”
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