Susan F. Redmondhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-9618-4371,1 Laurent Pueyo,2 Leonid Pogorelyuk,3 Emiel H. Por,2 James Noss,2 Keira Brooks,2 Iva Laginja,4 Marshall D. Perrin,2 Rémi Soummer,2 N. Jeremy Kasdin1
1Princeton Univ. (United States) 2Space Telescope Science Institute (United States) 3Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States) 4Lab. d'Etudes Spatiales et d'Instrumentation en Astrophysique (France)
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.
Directly imaging exoplanets requires long integration times when using a space-based coronagraphic instrument due to the small number of photons. Wavefront stability on the same timescale is of the utmost importance; a difficult feat in the presence of thermal and mechanical instabilities. In this paper, we demonstrate that dark zone maintenance (DZM) functions in the low signal-to-noise (SNR) regime similar to that expected for the Roman Space Telescope (RST) and the “large (∼6 m aperture) infrared/optical/ultraviolet (IR/O/UV) space telescope” recommended by the 2021 decadal survey. We develop low-photon experiments with tunable noise properties to provide a representative extrapolation. The experiments are performed on the High-contrast Imager for Complex Aperture Telescopes (HiCAT) at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). High-order wavefront error drifts are injected using a pair of kilo-deformable mirrors (DMs). The drifts are corrected using the DMs via the DZM algorithm; note that the current limiting factor for the DZM results is the air environment. We show that DZM can maintain a contrast of 5.3 × 10−8 in the presence of DM random walk drift with a low SNR.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.
The alert did not successfully save. Please try again later.
Susan F. Redmond, Laurent Pueyo, Leonid Pogorelyuk, Emiel H. Por, James Noss, Keira Brooks, Iva Laginja, Marshall D. Perrin, Rémi Soummer, N. Jeremy Kasdin, "Dark zone maintenance for future coronagraphic space missions," Proc. SPIE 12180, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2022: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave, 121802B (27 August 2022); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2630682