SIMSPIN - Constructing mock IFS kinematic data cubes

We present SIMSPIN, a new, public, software framework for generating integral field spectroscopy (IFS) data cubes from N-body/hydrodynamical simulations of galaxies, which can be compared directly with observational datasets. SIMSPIN provides a consistent method for studying a galaxy's stellar component. It can be used to explore how observationally inferred measurements of kinematics, such as the spin parameter $λ_R$ , are impacted by the effects of, for example, inclination, seeing conditions, distance. SIMSPIN is written in R and has been designed to be highly modular, flexible, and extensible. It is already being used by the astrophysics community to generate IFS-like cubes and FITS files for direct comparison of simulations to observations. In this paper, we explain the conceptual framework of SIMSPIN; how it is implemented in R; and we demonstrate SIMSPIN's current capabilities, providing as an example a brief investigation of how numerical resolution affects how reliably we can recover the intrinsic stellar kinematics of a simulated galaxy.