Bijan Nemati

TL;DR: In 2014, the Science Definition Team (SDT) of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) mission presented a design reference mission (DRM) for an implementation of WFIRST using one of the 2.4m, Hubble-quality telescopes recently made available to NASA as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: The WFIRST-AFTA 2.37m telescope will provide the opportunity to host a coronagraph for the imaging and spectroscopy of planets and disks in the next decade.

TL;DR: In this article, the electron multiplying charge-coupled device (EMCCD) has been baselined for both of the coronagraphs sensors, including the imaging camera and integral field spectrograph.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors increase the fidelity of these calculations substantially, adopting more realistic exoplanet demographics as input, an improved target list, and a realistic distribution of exozodi levels, and use these standards to directly compare the performance of realistic instrument designs, including the sensitivity of coronagraph contrast to stellar diameter, and adopt engineering-based throughputs and detector parameters.

TL;DR: The fidelity of yield calculations for direct-imaging missions is increased substantially, adopting more realistic exoplanet demographics as input, an improved target list, and a realistic distribution of exozodi levels, and standardized inputs for instrument simulations are defined.