NRC integrated modeling: experimental validation with SPIDERS

The NRC integrated modelling (NRCim) toolset has been developed at the NRC Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre (HAA) for many years and has been used to predict complex system performance for several projects (eg. TMT primary mirror, NFIRAOS, IRIS, GPI). Although extensive software validation has been completed to ensure the validity of the NRCim results, there has not previously been an opportunity to measure the delivered performance of an instrument and complete an experimental validation of the NRCim toolset. With the recent assembly and testing of the SPIDERS instrument (Subaru Pathfinder Instrument for Detecting Exoplanets & Retrieving Spectra), our team at HAA has used the NRCim toolset to predict the performance of the SPIDERS instrument and subsequently completed directly measurements of the performance in the presence of prescribed disturbances. The measurements of the SPIDERS performance are compared with the NRCim-predicted performance providing a direct validation of the NRCim toolset.