Related papers: Stroke saturation on a MEMS deformable mirror for …
Future large space telescopes will be equipped with adaptive optics (AO) to overcome wavefront aberrations and achieve high contrast for imaging faint astronomical objects, such as earth-like exoplanets and debris disks. In contrast to AO…
The MCAO Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph (MAVIS) is a new visible instrument for ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT). Its Adaptive Optics Module (AOM) must provide extreme adaptive optics correction level at low galactic latitude and…
TESS is expected to discover dozens of temperate terrestrial planets orbiting M dwarfs whose atmospheres could be followed up with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Currently, the TRAPPIST-1 system serves as a benchmark to determine…
Tunable focusing is a desired property in a wide range of optical imaging and sensing technologies but has tended to require bulky components which cannot be integrated on-chip and have slow actuation speeds. Recently, integration of…
In the development of space-based large telescope systems, having the capability to perform active optics correction allows correcting wavefront aberrations caused by thermal perturbations so as to achieve diffraction-limited performance…
Strong gravitational lensing is a powerful probe of the distribution of matter on sub-kpc scales. It can be used to test the existence of completely dark subhalos surrounding galaxies, as predicted by the standard cold dark matter model, or…
Whether is ground-based or space-based, any optical instrument suffers from some amount of optical geometric distortion. Recently, the diffraction-limited image quality afforded by space-based telescopes and by Adaptive Optics (AO)…
The future large adaptive telescopes will trigger new constraints for the calibration of Adaptive Optics (AO) systems equipped with pre-focal Deformable Mirrors (DM). The image of the DM actuators grid as seen by the Wave-Front Sensor (WFS)…
We propose a new concept of pupil motion sensor for astronomical adaptive optics systems and present experimental results obtained during the first laboratory validation of this concept. Pupil motion is an important issue in the case of…
The Maximum Eccentricity Method (MEM) is a standard tool for the analysis of planetary systems and their stability. The method amounts to estimating the maximal stretch of orbits over sampled domains of initial conditions. The present paper…
We report the results of a search for a dust trail aligned with the orbit plane of the large main-belt asteroid (24) Themis, which has been reported to have water ice frost on its surface. Observations were obtained with the GMOS instrument…
We present a new approach for correcting instrumental polarization by modeling the non-depolarizing effects of a complex series of optical elements to determine physically realizable Mueller matrices. Provided that the Mueller matrix of the…
Orbital monitoring of exoplanetary and stellar systems is fundamental for analysing their architecture, dynamical stability and evolution, and mechanisms of formation. Current high-contrast extreme-adaptive optics imagers like SPHERE, GPI,…
Extrapolations of line-of-sight photospheric field measurements predict radial interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) strengths that are factors of ~2--4 too low. To address this "open flux problem,'' we reanalyze the magnetograph measurements…
We investigate the stability of a segmented deformable mirror (DM) on high-contrast testbeds and its impact on the images produced with coronagraphs. Segmented apertures are promising to obtain large primary mirrors for future missions with…
The EDGES collaboration has recently reported the detection of an unexpectedly stronger absorption signal in the global 21-cm spectrum around cosmic red-shift z = 17, resulting in the significant cooling of the primordial gas. The cooling…
The Thirty Meter Telescope will use a sophisticated adaptive optics system called NFIRAOS. This system utilizes two deformable mirrors conjugate to 0 km and 11.2 km to apply a Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) correction over a 2…
We present in this study a first analysis of the astrometric error budget of absolute astrometry relative to background galaxies using adaptive optics. We use for this analysis multi-conjugated adaptive optics (MCAO) images obtained with…
The need for high dynamic range imaging is crucial in many astronomical fields, such as extra-solar planet direct detection, extra-galactic science and circumstellar imaging. Using a high quality coronograph, dynamic ranges of up to…
High-contrast imaging has been used to discover and characterize dozens of exoplanets to date. The primary limiting performance factor for these instruments is contrast, the ratio of exoplanet to host star brightness that an instrument can…