Echoing humanity's intellectual curiosity about extraterrestrial life, NASA's Astro2020 Decadal Survey identifies the search for biosignatures from exoplanets as a top scientific pursuit. A flagship mission aims to utilize infrared/optical/ultraviolet technologies to explore the universe for signs of life. This endeavor necessitates the development of space-borne coronagraphs capable of suppressing stellar light by a factor of 10 billion to reveal faint Earth-like companions.

This presents a formidable computational challenge in optimizing several thousand design parameters that specify finely tailored shapes of optical surfaces/planes, which manipulate optical wavefronts to suppress stellar light. Large telescope mirror structures pose further design challenges due to additional light scattering and mechanical deformations causing optical instabilities.

Collaborating with partners at NASA JPL, our primary objective is to significantly enhance the computational efficiency of telescope-coronagraph system analysis. By designing coronagraph pupil apodization and focal-plane masks for higher starlight suppression and better exoplanet light throughput, we aim to advance the capabilities of future NASA exoplanet missions. Our method-of-moments-based approach enables optimal pupil basis set computation and fast reconstruction, model order reduction for sensitivity analysis, and constrained least squares optimization for focal plane mask design.