Related papers: Fundamental limits to high-contrast wavefront cont…

As the performance of coronagraphs improves, the achievable contrast is more and more dependent of the shape of the pupil. The future generation of space and ground based coronagraphic instruments will have to achieve high contrast levels…

A lower bound on unbiased estimates of wavefront errors (WFE) is presented for the linear regime of small perturbation and active control of a high-contrast region (dark hole). Analytical approximations and algorithms for computing the…

For the technology development of the mission EXCEDE (EXoplanetary Circumstellar Environments and Disk Explorer) - a 0.7 m telescope equipped with a Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization Coronagraph (PIAA-C) and a 2000-element MEMS deformable…

Differential wavefront sensing is an essential technique for optimising the performance of many precision interferometric experiments. Perhaps the most extensive application of this is for alignment sensing using radio-frequency beats…

Continuous wavefront sensing on future space telescopes allows relaxation of stability requirements while still allowing on-orbit diffraction-limited optical performance. We consider the suitability of phase retrieval to continuously…

Uncorrected wavefront errors create speckle noise in high-contrast observations at small inner-working angles. These speckles can be sensed and controlled by using coronagraph integrated wavefront sensors. Here, we will present how the…

One of the primary science goals of the Large UV/Optical/Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR) mission concept is to detect and characterize Earth-like exoplanets orbiting nearby stars with direct imaging. The success of its coronagraph instrument…

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 need for both high quality images and lightweight structures is one of the main drivers in space telescope design. An efficient wavefront control system will become mandatory in future large observatories, retaining performance while…

All coronagraphic instruments for exoplanet high-contrast imaging need wavefront correction systems to reject optical aberrations and create sufficiently dark holes. Since the most efficient wavefront correction algorithms (controllers and…

To reach and maintain high contrast levels, coronagraph instruments will require a combination of low-order and high-order wavefront control techniques to correct for dynamic wavefront error. Efficient low-order wavefront sensing and…

Imaging exo-Earths is an exciting but challenging task because of the 10^-10 contrast ratio between these planets and their host star at separations narrower than 100 mas. Large segmented aperture space telescopes enable the sensitivity…

The behavior of an adaptive optics (AO) system for ground-based high contrast imaging (HCI) dictates the achievable contrast of the instrument. In conditions where the coherence time of the atmosphere is short compared to the speed of the…

The electric field conjugation (EFC) algorithm has shown promise for removing scattered starlight from high-contrast imaging measurements, both in numerical simulations and laboratory experiments. To prepare for the deployment of EFC using…

An adaptive optics system with a single deformable mirror is being implemented on the THEMIS 90cm solar telescope. This system is designed to operate in the visible and is required to be as robust as possible in order to deliver the best…

Very high dynamical range coronagraphs targeting direct exo-planet detection (10^9 - 10^10 contrast) at small angular separation (few lambda/D units) usually require an input wavefront quality on the order of ten thousandths of wavelength…

A high contrast coronagraph is expected to provide one of the promising ways to directly observe extra-solar planets. We present the newest results of our laboratory experiment investigating "rigid" coronagraph with a binary shaped…

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…

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…

The success of ground-based instruments for high contrast exoplanet imaging depends on the degree to which adaptive optics (AO) systems can mitigate atmospheric turbulence. While modern AO systems typically suffer from millisecond time lags…