Updated simulation tools for Roman coronagraph PSFs

Abstract

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Instrument will be the first large scale coronagraph mission with active wavefront control to be operated in space and will demonstrate technologies essential to future missions to image Earth-like planets. Consisting of multiple coronagraph modes, the coronagraph is expected to characterize and image exoplanets at 1E-8 or better contrast levels. An object-oriented physical optics modeling tool called POPPY provides flexible and efficient simulations of high-contrast point spread functions (PSFs). As such, three coronagraph modes have been modeled in POPPY. In this paper, we present the recent testing results of the models and provide quantitative comparisons between results from POPPY and existing tools such as PROPER/FALCO. These comparisons include the computation times required for PSF calculations. In addition, we discuss the future implementation of the POPPY models for the POPPY front-end package WebbPSF, a widely used simulation tool for JWST PSFs.