Related papers: Wavefront Sensing in Space from the PICTURE-B Soun…
We report on the successful sounding rocket flight of the high resolution (R=3000-4000) J-PEX EUV spectrometer. J-PEX is a novel normal incidence instrument, which combines the focusing and dispersive elements of the spectrometer into a…
Orbital debris is a constraint on the long-term health of any spacecraft and must be consi-dered during mission planning. Varying mechanisms have been proposed to quantify the problem. Accurate in-situ data is essential with various types…
The Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon 1 (EUSO-SPB1) instrument was launched out of Wanaka, New Zealand, by NASA in April, 2017 as a mission of opportunity. The detector was developed as part of the Joint…
The Planck satellite has identified several patches of sky with low polarized dust emission, obvious targets for searches for the cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) B-mode signal from inflationary gravitational waves. Still, given the Planck…
Reliable spatial information can be difficult to obtain in planetary remote sensing applications because of errors present in the metadata of images taken with space probes. We have designed a pipeline to address this problem on…
The NASA/ASI Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, which will be launched in 2021, will be the first instrument to perform spatially resolved X-ray polarimetry on several astronomical sources in the 2-8 keV energy band. These measurements are…
The Wide-Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is a NASA space mission in study for launch in 2024. It has a 2.4 m telescope, wide-field IR instrument operating in the 0.7 - 2.0 micron range and an exoplanet imaging coronagraph…
Solar System observations that serve as analogs for exoplanet remote sensing data can provide important opportunities to validate ideas and models related to exoplanet environments. Critically, and unlike true exoplanet observations, Solar…
The upcoming Roman Coronagraph will be the first high-contrast instrument in space capable of high-order wavefront sensing and control technologies, a critical technology demonstration for the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO)…
Polarimetry is widely considered a powerful observational technique in X-ray astronomy, useful to enhance our understanding of the emission mechanisms, geometry and magnetic field arrangement of many compact objects. However, the lack of…
We present a vacuum window mechanism that is useful for applications requiring two different vacuum windows in series, with one of them movable and resealable. Such applications include space borne instruments that can benefit from a thin…
B-Pol is a medium-class space mission aimed at detecting the primordial gravitational waves generated during inflation through high accuracy measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization. We discuss the scientific…
We have designed and built the first band-limited coronagraphic mask used for ground-based high-contrast imaging observations. The mask resides in the focal plane of the near-infrared camera PHARO at the Palomar Hale telescope and receives…
Cool Planet Imaging Coronagraph (CPI-C) on Chinese Space Station Survey Telescope (CSST) is proposed to direct image the cool planets around nearby solar-type stars (within 40 pc). The core scientific objective of CPI-C is to conduct…
Linking a coronagraph instrument to a spectrograph via a single mode optical fiber is a pathway towards detailed characterization of exoplanet atmospheres with current and future ground- and space-based telescopes. However, given the…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is ushering in a new era in remote sensing of exoplanetary atmospheres. Atmospheric retrievals of exoplanets can be highly sensitive to high-precision JWST data. It is, therefore, imperative to…
The characterization of exoplanet atmospheres using direct imaging spectroscopy requires high-contrast over a wide wavelength range. We study a recently proposed focal plane wavefront estimation algorithm that exclusively uses broadband…
We imaged Uranus in the near infrared from 2012 into 2014, using the Keck/NIRC2 camera and Gemini/NIRI camera, both with adaptive optics. We obtained exceptional signal to noise ratios by averaging 8-16 individual exposures in a…
We propose to explore a cascade extreme Adaptive optics (ExAO) approach with a second stage based on a Zernike wavefront sensor (ZWFS) for exoplanet imaging and spectroscopy. Most exoplanet imagers currently use a single-stage ExAO to…
The volume available on small satellites restricts the size of optical apertures to a few centimetres, limiting the Ground-Sampling Distance (GSD) in the visible to typically 3 m at 500 km. We present in this paper the latest development of…