Related papers: Techniques for High-Contrast Imaging in Multi-Star…
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is a flagship mission concept proposing to characterize earth-like exoplanets at high contrast with a coronagraph instrument. The most in-depth, validated contrast error budgets made to date have been…
Due to the limited number of photons, directly imaging planets requires long integration times with a coronagraphic instrument. The wavefront must be stable on the same time scale, which is often difficult in space due to thermal variations…
Direct exoplanet detection is limited by speckle noise in the point spread function (PSF) of the central star. This noise can be reduced by subtracting PSF images obtained simultaneously in adjacent narrow spectral bands using a…
WFIRST will conduct a coronagraphic program of characterizing the atmospheres of planets around bright nearby stars. When observed with the WFIRST Wide Field Camera, these stars will saturate the detector and produce very strong diffraction…
Direct imaging of exoplanets presents a formidable technical challenge owing to the small angular separation and high contrast between exoplanets and their host stars. High Dispersion Coronagraphy (HDC) is a pathway to achieve unprecedented…
Direct imaging of Earth-like planets is one of the main science cases for the next generation of extremely large telescopes. This is very challenging due to the star-planet contrast that must be overcome. Most current high-contrast imaging…
We performed an experimental verification of a coronagraph. As a result, we confirmed that, at the focal region where the planetary point spread function exists, the coronagraph system mitigates the raw contrast of a star-planet system by…
Direct imaging of Earth-like planets from space requires dedicated observatories, combining large segmented apertures with instruments and techniques such as coronagraphs, wavefront sensors, and wavefront control in order to reach the high…
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…
HWO aims to directly image objects orbiting Sun-like stars, using a 6-m telescope capable of high-contrast imaging ($10^{-10}$) and spectroscopy to search for biosignatures in planets located in the habitable zone. Recent laboratory…
High-contrast imaging of exoplanets and protoplanetary disks depends on wavefront sensing and correction made by adaptive optics instruments. Classically, wavefront sensing has been conducted at optical wavelengths, which made high-contrast…
We propose a new approach for high-contrast imaging at the diffraction limit using segmented telescopes in a modest observation bandwidth. This concept, named "spectroscopic fourth-order coronagraphy", is based on a fourth-order coronagraph…
Any high-contrast imaging instrument in a future large space-based telescope will include an integral field spectrograph (IFS) for measuring broadband starlight residuals and characterizing the exoplanet's atmospheric spectrum. In this…
The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) will be the first high-performance stellar coronagraph using active wavefront control for deep starlight suppression in space, providing unprecedented levels of…
Future large segmented space telescopes and their coronagraphic instruments are expected to provide the resolution and sensitivity to observe Earth-like planets with a 10^10 contrast ratio at less than 100 mas from their host star. Advanced…
Specific high contrast imaging instruments are mandatory to characterize circumstellar disks and exoplanets around nearby stars. Coronagraphs are commonly used in these facilities to reject the diffracted light of an observed star and…
Wavefront shaping allows focusing light through or inside strongly scattering media, but the background intensity also increases due to long-range correlations, reducing the target's contrast. By manipulating non-local intensity…
Instrumentation techniques in the field of direct imaging of exoplanets have greatly advanced over the last two decades. Two of the four NASA-commissioned large concept studies involve a high-contrast instrument for the imaging and spectral…
High-contrast imaging systems using active control with adaptive optics (AO) are often limited by non-common path (NCP) aberrations that are seen only at the final science image. AO systems employing focal-plane wavefront sensors (FP-WFSs)…
The mission EXCEDE (EXoplanetary Circumstellar Environments and Disk Explorer), selected by NASA for technology development, is designed to study the formation, evolution and architectures of exoplanetary systems and characterize…