Monday 15 June 2026, by Corentin Louis
The development of orbiting radio interferometer concepts offers new opportunities for astronomical observations but also introduces significant challenges, particularly assessing and optimizing instrument performance. This work introduces a simulation toolbox for orbiting low-frequency radio interferometers tailored to evaluate the impact of design parameters on the instrument performances.
Space-borne interferometers are envisioned to perform observations of radio emissions with frequencies below the Earth’s ionospheric cutoff (∼10 MHz) that cannot be observed from the ground. They provide spatially resolved observations that enable mapping the sky or measuring dynamic spectra from distant sources.
While concepts involving surface-based arrays on the Moon can leverage existing simulation tools developed for terrestrial interferometers, orbiting interferometers require specialized simulation capabilities that are currently lacking.
To address this need, we present OASyS (Orbital Aperture Synthesis Simulator), a Python-based simulation toolbox specifically developed for modeling orbiting low-frequency interferometers.
We address the unique operational characteristics of such instruments and how this framework implements them. We also present the tools provided by OASyS and the procedure of the main pipeline intended to be run to evaluate the instrument’s performance.
This paper describes the first official stable release (version 1.0) of the tool.
We discuss the applications of this toolbox and its limitations, and we suggest improvements.