Related papers: ESCAPE project. CAPyBARA: a Roman Coronagraph simu…
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…
Active coronagraphy is deemed to play a key role for the next generation of high-contrast instruments, notably in order to deal with large segmented mirrors that might exhibit time-dependent pupil merit function, caused by missing or…
The 2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics endorsed space-based high contrast imaging for the detection and characterization of habitable exoplanets as a key priority for the upcoming decade. To advance the maturity of starlight…
We present a MIR coronagraph to target the direct observation of extrasolar planets for SPICA, in which a coronagraph is currently regarded as an option of the focal plane instruments. The primary target of the SPICA coronagraph is the…
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…
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a flagship astrophysics mission planned for launch no later than May 2027. The Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) aboard Roman will demonstrate the technology for direct imaging and spectroscopy of…
High contrast imaging using coronagraphy is one of the main avenues to enable the search for life on extrasolar Earth analogs. The HiCAT testbed aims to demonstrate coronagraphy and wavefront control for segmented on-axis space telescopes…
Imaging faint objects, such as exoplanets or disks, around nearby stars is extremely challenging because host star images are dominated by the telescope diffraction pattern. Using a coronagraph is an efficient solution for removing…
Project 1640 is a high contrast near-infrared instrument probing the vicinities of nearby stars through the unique combination of an integral field spectrograph with a Lyot coronagraph and a high-order adaptive optics system. The…
We present scope (Simulated CCD Observations for Photometric Experimentation), a Python package to create a forward model of telescope detectors and simulate stellar targets with motion relative to the CCD. The primary application of this…
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…
Stellar coronagraph performance is highly sensitive to optical aberrations. In order to effectively suppress starlight for exoplanet imaging applications, low-order wavefront aberrations entering a coronagraph such as tip-tilt, defocus and…
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) will provide an opportunity to study dark energy with unprecedented precision and accuracy using several techniques, including measurements of high-$z$ Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia, $z \lesssim…
Deep sub-diffraction exoplanet discovery currently lies beyond the reach of state-of-the-art direct imaging coronagraphs, which typically have an inner working angle larger than the diffraction scale. We present an experimental…
The Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization (PIAA) coronagraph is a high performance coronagraph concept able to work at small angular separation with little loss in throughput. We present results obtained with a laboratory PIAA system…
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…
The next generation of high-precision astrometry is rapidly approaching thanks to ongoing and upcoming missions like Euclid, LSST, and RST. We present a new tool (available at https://github.com/KevinMcK95/gaia_roman_astrometry) to simulate…
Directly imaging Earth-sized exoplanets with a visible-light coronagraph instrument on a space telescope will require a system that can achieve $\sim10^{-10}$ raw contrast and maintain it for the duration of observations (on the order of…
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…
The raw coronagraphic performance of current high-contrast imaging instruments is limited by the presence of a quasi-static speckle (QSS) background, resulting from instrumental non-common path errors (NCPEs). Rapid development of efficient…