The Roman Coronagraph Community Participation Program: data reduction pipeline astrometric calibration

Abstract

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be equipped with a Technology Demonstration Coronagraph Instrument that will push the current limits of high contrast imaging for exoplanets ($10^{-9}$ contrast). The Roman Coronagraph Community Participation Program has developed corgidrp, a python-based data reduction pipeline for the Roman Coronagraph Instrument that will perform essential data processing and calibration steps for coronagraphic observations. The astrometric calibration function within corgidrp allows us to understand the on-sky angular size and distance scale of science observations by characterizing essential detector parameters: boresight, plate scale, north angle, and optical distortion. Measuring these astrometric calibration products not only helps us understand the science output of our data, but it is what allows us to point the Roman coronagraph accurately at our science target in the first place. Here, we describe the techniques used within the astrometric calibration and demonstrate that our algorithm meets Technology Demonstration Threshold Requirements: (1) compute the on-sky location of the center of CGI EXCAM detector to better than 30 [mas] and (2) compute the on-sky position angles of the camera axes to within 0.3 [deg].