Related papers: Wavefront Sensing in Space from the PICTURE-B Soun…

RISTRETTO is the evolution of the original idea of coupling the VLT instruments SPHERE and ESPRESSO, aiming at High Dispersion Coronagraphy. RISTRETTO is a visitor instrument that should enable the characterization of the atmospheres of…

In the two decades since the first extra-solar planet was discovered, the detection and characterization of extra-solar planets has become one of the key endeavors in all of modern science. Recently direct detection techniques such as…

Directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets within habitable zones is challenging because faint signals can be obscured by exozodiacal dust, analogous to our solar system's zodiacal dust. This dust scatters starlight, creating a bright…

Future high-contrast imagers on ground-based extremely large telescopes will have to deal with the segmentation of the primary mirrors. Residual phase errors coming from the phase steps at the edges of the segments will have to be minimized…

The field of exoplanets has rapidly expanded from the exclusivity of exoplanet detection to include exoplanet characterization. A key step towards this characterization will be retrieval of planetary albedos and rotation rates from highly…

We investigated the radio wavefront of cosmic-ray air showers with LOPES measurements and CoREAS simulations: the wavefront is of approximately hyperbolic shape and its steepness is sensitive to the shower maximum. For this study we used…

We report on the Balloonborne Investigation of Temperature and Speed of Electrons in the corona (BITSE) mission launched recently to observe the solar corona from about 3 Rs to 15 Rs at four wavelengths (393.5, 405.0, 398.7, and 423.4 nm).…

Parker Solar Probe (PSP), NASA's latest and closest mission to the Sun, is on a journey to investigate fundamental enigmas of the inner heliosphere. This paper reports initial observations made by the Solar Probe Analyzer for Ions (SPAN-I),…

Direct imaging of exoplanets represents a challenge for astronomical instrumentation due to the high-contrast ratio and small angular separation between the host star and the faint planet. Multi-star systems pose additional challenges for…

The RISTRETTO instrument, a proposed visible high-contrast, high-resolution spectrograph for the VLT, has the primary science goal of detecting reflected light from nearby exoplanets and characterizing their atmospheres. Specifically, it…

Imaging terrestrial exoplanets around nearby stars is a formidable technical challenge, requiring the development of coronagraphs to suppress the stellar halo of diffracted light at the location of the planet. In this review, we derive the…

Ground-based high contrast imaging (HCI) and extreme adaptive optics (AO) technologies have advanced to the point of enabling direct detections of gas-giant exoplanets orbiting beyond the snow lines around nearby young star systems.…

Rocket technology, originally developed for military applications, has provided a low-cost observing platform to carry critical and rapid-response scientific investigations for over 70 years. Even with the development of launch vehicles…

Context: The detection and characterization of Earth-like exoplanets (exoEarths) from space requires exquisite wavefront stability at contrast levels of $10^{-10}$. On segmented telescopes in particular, aberrations induced by cophasing…

This paper demonstrates a cryogenic deformable mirror (DM) with 1,020 actuators based on micro-electrical mechanical systems (MEMS) technology. Cryogenic space-borne infrared telescopes can experience a wavefront error due to a figure error…

Context. Solar wavefront sensing has been a challenge for astrophysical instrumentalists, due to the low contrast between the Sun and the sky background compared to night-time observations, which limits the performance of adaptive optics…

The anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background are a gold mine for cosmology and fundamental physics. ESA's Planck satellite should soon extract all information from the temperature vein but will be limited concerning the measurement…

The Siberian Solar Radio Telescope (SSRT) is a solar-dedicated directly-imaging interferometer observing the Sun at 5.7 GHz. The SSRT operates in the two-dimensional mode since 1996. The imaging principle of the SSRT restricts its…

EarthFinder is a Probe Mission concept selected for study by NASA for input to the 2020 astronomy decadal survey. This study is currently active and a final white paper report is due to NASA at the end of calendar 2018. We are tasked with…

The coronagraphic instrument currently proposed for the WFIRST-AFTA mission will be the first example of a space-based coronagraph optimized for extremely high contrasts that are required for the direct imaging of exoplanets reflecting the…