SPHERE (Spectro Polarimetric High contrast Exoplanet REsearch), the planet finder instrument for the VLT is designed to study relatively bright extrasolar giant planets around young or nearby stars. SPHERE is a set of three instruments fed by the same AO-system, two of them share the same coronagraph. This complex system has been modeled with Fourier Optics to investigate the performance of the whole instrument. In turns, this end-to-end model was useful to analyze the sensitivity to various parameters (WFE, alignment of the coronagraph, differential aberrations) and to put some specifications on the sub-systems. This paper presents some example of sensitivity analysis and some contrast performance of the instruments as a function of the flux for the main observing mode of SPHERE: the Dual Band Imaging (DBI), equivalent to the Spectral Differential Imaging technique.
@article{arxiv.0807.0697,
title = {End to End Simulation of AO-assisted coronagraphic differential imaging: estimation of performance for SPHERE},
author = {Anthony Boccaletti and Marcel Carbillet and Thierry Fusco and David Mouillet and Maud Langlois and Claire Moutou and Kjetil Dohlen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0807.0697},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
11 pages, will be published in the proceeding of the SPIE conference Volume 7015 "Adaptive Optics", held in Marseille from 23 to 28 june 2008