IMPipeline: an integrated STOP modeling pipeline for the WFIRST coronagraph (Conference Presentation)

We have developed an automated software pipeline to perform Structural-Thermal-Optical Performance (STOP) analysis of the WFIRST coronagraph. The Coronagraph Instrument on the Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will search for exoplanets by controlling the diffraction of the host star light in order to suppress it and allow the planet light to become observable. Since the planet light is billions of times dimmer than the star light, precise control of the light is challenging and susceptible to even minute imperfections such as thermally induced deformations of the optics. The observatory STOP analysis is used to assess the impact of such perturbations. The pipeline integrates the thermal, structural, and optical analysis software to run a STOP analysis in a seamless manner, with the final output being optical wave-front errors for an input observational scenario. The pipeline is written in the Python high level language and uses the Luigi framework for dependency resolution, workload management, and visualization. The initial version uses Thermal Desktop for thermal analysis, NX NASTRAN for structural analysis, SigFit for optical surface fitting, and CODE V for optical analysis. The pipeline can be easily customized using configuration files and provides users with a web interface to monitor the submitted job. This paper will present results showing how the pipeline can be used to simulate different observational scenarios to generate optical wave-front errors. Which in turn are propagated through simulated WFIRST coronagraph optical system to generate realistic speckle patterns.