Demonstration of high contrast with an obscured aperture with the WFIRST-AFTA shaped pupil coronagraph

Abstract

The coronagraph instrument on the WFIRST-AFTA mission study has two coronagraphic architectures, shaped pupil and hybrid Lyot, which may be interchanged for use in different observing scenarios. Each architecture relies on newly-developed mask components to function in the presence of the AFTA aperture, and so both must be matured to a high technology readiness level (TRL) in advance of the mission. A series of milestones were set to track the development of the technologies required for the instrument; in this paper, we report on completion of WFIRST-AFTA Coronagraph Milestone 2---a narrowband $10^{-8}$ contrast test with static aberrations for the shaped pupil---and the plans for the upcoming broadband Coronagraph Milestone 5.

arXiv comment35 pages, 15 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Wide-Field InfrarRed Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets WFIRST-AFTA 2015 Report
• Fast computation of Lyot-style coronagraph propagation
• High Performance Lyot and PIAA Coronagraphy for Arbitrarily shaped Telescope Apertures
• Circularly Symmetric Apodization via Starshaped Masks
• Rectangular-Mask Coronagraphs for High-Contrast Imaging

Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Characterization of Exoplanet Atmospheres with the Optical Coronagraph on WFIRST
• Techniques for High-Contrast Imaging in Multi-Star Systems II: Multi-Star Wavefront Control
• Flight mask designs of the Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Instrument
• Laboratory and On-Sky Validation of the Shaped Pupil Coronagraph's Sensitivity to Low-Order Aberrations With Active Wavefront Control
• High-contrast imager for complex aperture telescopes (HiCAT): 5. first results with segmented-aperture coronagraph and wavefront control
• Laboratory Demonstration of Spatial Linear Dark Field Control For Imaging Extrasolar Planets in Reflected Light
• High-order wavefront sensing and control for the Roman Coronagraph Instrument (CGI): architecture and measured performance
• Demonstration of broadband contrast at 1.2 $\lambda$/D and greater for the EXCEDE Starlight Suppression System
• Flight masks of the Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Instrument