Related papers: WaveDriver: a Laser Guide Star AO System for HWO

HWO's Tier 1 Contrast Stability Technology Gap presents a key challenge for technology development in the coming years, requiring to a >100x more stable system than JWST. WaveDriver is a concept for a laser guide star spacecraft coupled to…

The instrument payload of the future Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will span a wide range of wavelengths, including the ultraviolet (UV) region that cannot be easily accessed from the ground (< 350 nm). Along with its primary mission…

NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will be the first space telescope capable of directly imaging Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars to probe their atmospheres for signs of life. Now in its early stages of…

Astronomical adaptive optics (AO) is a critical approach to enable ground-based diffraction-limited imaging and high contrast science, with the potential to enable habitable exoplanet imaging on future extremely large telescopes. However,…

Traditional wavefront control in high-energy, high-intensity laser systems usually lacks real-time capability, failing to address dynamic aberrations. This limits experimental accuracy due to shot-to-shot fluctuations and necessitates long…

Maintaining long-term wavefront stability is critical for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), which targets contrasts approaching $10^{-10}$ and therefore requires continuous dark-zone maintenance using high-order wavefront sensing and…

One important frontier for astronomical adaptive optics (AO) involves methods such as Multi-Object AO and Multi-Conjugate AO that have the potential to give a significantly larger field of view than conventional AO techniques. A second key…

Precision wavefront control on future segmented-aperture space telescopes presents significant challenges, particularly in the context of high-contrast exoplanet direct imaging. We present a new wavefront control architecture that…

Executive Summary: The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is the first astrophysics flagship mission with a key cross-divisional astrobiology science goal of searching for signs of life on rocky planets beyond our solar system. The Living…

Adaptive optics (AO) systems are crucial for high-resolution astronomical observations by compensating for atmospheric turbulence. While laser guide stars (LGS) address high-order wavefront aberrations, natural guide stars (NGS) remain…

Exoplanetary science is increasingly prioritizing efforts toward direct imaging of planetary systems, with emphasis on those that may enable the detection and characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets. The recent 2020 Astronomy…

Adaptive optics laser guide star systems perform atmospheric correction of stellar wavefronts in two parts: stellar tip-tilt and high-spatial-order laser-correction. The requirement of a sufficiently bright guide star in the field-of-view…

The planned NASA Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) flagship mission aims to image and spectroscopically characterise 25 Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of their stars. However, one giant planet in the habitable zone can ruin your…

The HWO Target Stars and Systems 2025 (TSS25) list is a community-developed catalog of potential stellar targets for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) in its survey to directly image Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone. The TSS25…

In ground-based astronomy, Adaptive Optics (AO) is a pivotal technique, engineered to correct wavefront phase distortions and thereby enhance the quality of the observed images. Integral to an AO system is the wavefront sensor (WFS), which…

In the last decade, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Virgo observatory have opened a new observational window on the universe. These cavity-enhanced laser interferometers sense spacetime…

Exoplanet direct imaging allows us to directly probe and characterize an exoplanet's atmosphere, searching for signs of life in its atmospheric signatures. Directly imaging an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star requires reaching…

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), NASA's next flagship science mission, follows in the tradition of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and other preceding great observatories. HWO will directly image and characterize Earth-like…

The main objective of the present project is to explore the viability of an adaptive optics control system based exclusively on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), making strong use of their parallel processing capability. In an…

We present the status and goals of the readout electronics system we are developing to support the detector arrays in the coronagraph instrument on the NASA Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) mission currently in development. HWO aims to…