The challenges of high contrast imaging (HCI) for detecting exoplanets for both ground and space applications can be met with extreme adaptive optics (ExAO), a high-order adaptive optics system that performs wavefront sensing (WFS) and correction at high speed. We describe 2 ExAO optical system designs, one each for ground- based telescopes and space-based missions, and examine them using the angular spectrum Fresnel propagation module within the Physical Optics Propagation in Python (POPPY) package. We present an end-to-end (E2E) simulation of the MagAO-X instrument, an ExAO system capable of delivering 6x10-5 visible-light raw contrast for static, noncommon path aberrations without atmosphere. We present an E2E simulation of a laser guidestar (LGS) companion spacecraft testbed demonstration, which uses a remote beacon to increase the signal available for WFS and control of the primary aperture segments of a future large space telescope, providing of order 10 factor improvement for relaxing observatory stability requirements.
The nanosatellite optical downlink experiment (NODE) implements a free-space optical communications (lasercom) capability on a CubeSat platform that can support low earth orbit (LEO) to ground downlink rates>10 Mbps. A primary goal of NODE is to leverage commercially available technologies to provide a scalable and cost-effective alternative to radio-frequency-based communications. The NODE transmitter uses a 200-mW 1550-nm master-oscillator power-amplifier design using power-efficient M-ary pulse position modulation. To facilitate pointing the 0.12-deg downlink beam, NODE augments spacecraft body pointing with a microelectromechanical fast steering mirror (FSM) and uses an 850-nm uplink beacon to an onboard CCD camera. The 30-cm aperture ground telescope uses an infrared camera and FSM for tracking to an avalanche photodiode detector-based receiver. Here, we describe our approach to transition prototype transmitter and receiver designs to a full end-to-end CubeSat-scale system. This includes link budget refinement, drive electronics miniaturization, packaging reduction, improvements to pointing and attitude estimation, implementation of modulation, coding, and interleaving, and ground station receiver design. We capture trades and technology development needs and outline plans for integrated system ground testing.
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