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Published July 2022 | Published
Journal Article Open

Modeling and performance analysis of the LUVOIR coronagraph instrument

Abstract

Future space missions such as the Large UV/Optical/Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR) and the Habitable Exoplanet Observatory, when equipped with coronagraphs with active wavefront control to suppress starlight, will allow the discovery and characterization of habitable exoplanets. The Extreme Coronagraph for Living Planetary Systems (ECLIPS) is the coronagraph instrument on the LUVOIR Surveyor mission concept, an 8- to 15-m segmented telescope. ECLIPS is split into three channels, namely, UV (200 to 400 nm), optical (400 to 850 nm), and near IR (850 nm to 2 μm), with each channel equipped with two deformable mirrors for wavefront control, a suite of coronagraph masks, a low-order/out-of-band wavefront sensor, and separate science imagers and spectrographs. The apodized pupil Lyot coronagraph and the vector vortex coronagraph are the baselined mask technologies for ECLIPS to enable the required contrast for observations in the habitable zones of nearby stars for LUVOIR-A (15-m telescope) and LUVOIR-B (8-m telescope), respectively. Their performance depends on active wavefront sensing and control, as well as metrology subsystems to compensate for aberrations induced by segment errors (e.g., piston and tip/tilt), secondary mirror misalignment, and global low-order wavefront errors. Here, we present the latest results of the simulation of these effects for the LUVOIR coronagraph instrument and discuss the achieved contrast for exoplanet detection and characterization after closed-loop wavefront estimation and control algorithms have been applied. Finally, we show simulated observations using high-fidelity spatial and spectral input models of complete planetary systems generated with the Haystacks code framework.

Additional Information

© The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI. Received: 7 February 2022; Accepted: 17 June 2022; Published: 19 July 2022. R. Juanola-Parramon was supported by NASA through the CRESST II cooperative agreement CA 80GSFC17M0002 and by NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program's (ExEPs) Segmented Coronagraph Design and Analysis (SCDA) study. The authors would like to thank Dr. Rémi Soummer of STScI for the LUVOIR-A APLC coronagraph designs and the LUVOIR Study Team.

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023