Straylight analysis for the externally occulted Lyot solar coronagraph ASPIICS

The ESA formation Flying mission Proba-3 will y the giant solar coronagraph ASPIICS. The instrument is composed of a 1.4 meter diameter external occulting disc mounted on the Occulter Spacecraft and a Lyot-style solar coronagraph of 50mm diameter aperture carried by the Coronagraph Spacecraft positioned 144 meters behind. The system will observe the inner corona of the Sun, as close as 1.1 solar radius. For a solar coronagraph, the most critical source of straylight is the residual diffracted sunlight, which drives the scientific performance of the observation. This is especially the case for ASPIICS because of its reduced field-of-view close to the solar limb. The light from the Sun is first diffracted by the edge of the external occulter, and then propagates and scatters inside the instrument. There is a crucial need to estimate both intensity and distribution of the diffraction on the focal plane. Because of the very large size of the coronagraph, one cannot rely on representative full scale test campaign. Moreover, usual optics software package are not designed to perform such diffraction computation, with the required accuracy. Therefore, dedicated approaches have been developed in the frame of ASPIICS. First, novel numerical models compute the diffraction profile on the entrance pupil plane and instrument detector plane (Landini et al., Rougeot et al.), assuming perfect optics in the sense of multi-reflection and scattering. Results are confronted to experimental measurements of diffraction. The paper reports the results of the different approaches.