Shaped pupil coronagraph design improvements for the WFIRST coronagraph instrument

A. J. Eldorado Riggs; Neil T. Zimmerman; Bijan Nemati; John Krist

doi:10.1117/12.2274437

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1 September 2017 Shaped pupil coronagraph design improvements for the WFIRST coronagraph instrument

A. J. Eldorado Riggs, Neil T. Zimmerman, Bijan Nemati, John Krist

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Proceedings Volume 10400, Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets VIII; 104000O (2017) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2274437
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2017, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

NASA’s WFIRST Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) is planned to image and characterize exoplanets at high contrast. The CGI operating modes are the hybrid Lyot coronagraph for planet detection and inner debris disk imaging, a shaped pupil coronagraph for planet characterization, and another shaped pupil for outer disk imaging. Early CGI designs focused on overcoming the diffraction of the large pupil obscurations. Now that those designs have been proven to work in the lab, the design emphasis has been on achieving higher throughput and lower sensitivities to jitter and polarization aberrations. Here we present those improvements and the integration of science yield modeling into the spectrographic shaped pupil design process.

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A. J. Eldorado Riggs, Neil T. Zimmerman, Bijan Nemati, and John Krist "Shaped pupil coronagraph design improvements for the WFIRST coronagraph instrument", Proc. SPIE 10400, Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets VIII, 104000O (1 September 2017); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2274437

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