SIMBIO-Sim: a performance simulator for the SIMBIO-SYS suite on board the BepiColombo mission

Abstract

The SIMBIO-SYS simulator is a useful tool to test the instrument performance and to predict the instrument behaviour during the whole scientific mission. It has been developed with Interactive Data Language (IDL), and it give three groups of output data: i) the geometrical quantities related to the spacecraft and the channels, which include both the general information about the spacecraft and the information for each filter; ii) the radiometric outputs, which include the planet reflectance, the radiance and the expected signal measured by the detector; iii) the quantities related to the channel performance, which are for example the integration time (IT), which has to be defined to avoid the detector saturation, the expected dark current of the detector.