Simulating the WFIRST coronagraph Integral Field Spectrograph

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'crispy', a Python software package that simulates the integral field spectrograph of the WFIRST Coronagraph Instrument, aiding in design, testing, and analysis of high-contrast exoplanet imaging.

Contribution

The paper presents a new, publicly available Python tool for simulating the WFIRST CGI IFS, facilitating performance testing and design optimization.

Findings

Enables detailed simulation of the WFIRST CGI IFS performance.

Supports testing data extraction and sensitivity analysis techniques.

Assists in design trade studies for the instrument.

Abstract

A primary goal of direct imaging techniques is to spectrally characterize the atmospheres of planets around other stars at extremely high contrast levels. To achieve this goal, coronagraphic instruments have favored integral field spectrographs (IFS) as the science cameras to disperse the entire search area at once and obtain spectra at each location, since the planet position is not known a priori. These spectrographs are useful against confusion from speckles and background objects, and can also help in the speckle subtraction and wavefront control stages of the coronagraphic observation. We present a software package, the Coronagraph and Rapid Imaging Spectrograph in Python (crispy) to simulate the IFS of the WFIRST Coronagraph Instrument (CGI). The software propagates input science cubes using spatially and spectrally resolved coronagraphic focal plane cubes, transforms them into IFS detector maps and ultimately reconstructs the spatio-spectral input scene as a 3D datacube. Simulated IFS cubes can be used to test data extraction techniques, refine sensitivity analyses and carry out design trade studies of the flight CGI-IFS instrument. crispy is a publicly available Python package and can be adapted to other IFS designs.