Benchmark Computer Performance for Wavefront Sensing and Control on Next Generation Space Telescopes

Abstract

Future planned space telescopes, such as the HabEx and LUVOIR telescope concepts and the recently proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory, will use high contrast imaging and coronagraphy to directly image exoplanets for both detection and characterization. Such instruments will achieve the $\sim 10\wedge 10$ contrast level necessary for Earth-like exoplanet imaging by controlling thousands of actuators and sensing with thousands of pixels. Updates to the wavefront control actuators will need to be computed within seconds, placing unprecedented requirements on the real-time computational ability of radiation hardened processors. In this work we characterize the wavefront sensing and control algorithms to estimate the performance based on publicly available benchmark performance for currently available space-rated processors.