Planetscope Precursor Experiment

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

We present calculations and data on astronomical seeing from a balloon platform in the stratosphere. This work is in preparation for observing exoplanets with the Planetscope instrument, a proposed balloon-borne telescope and coronagraph. We use published satellite measurements of optical inhomogeneites in the stratosphere. We calculate that the free atmosphere above balloon altitudes will perturb a stellar wavefront by a comfortably small amount. We predict that speckles in the focal plane of an optical telescope will be faint, so that a number of known radial-velocity planets should be observable with a telescope and coronagraph. We also investigate the possible contribution of the stratospheric equivalent of a ground-based telescope's "dome seeing". This could arise from air density fluctuations caused by temperature differences between the ambient air and the telescope, gondola, or balloon. We flew a simple experiment in September 2007 to measure this effect. Data from this experiment will be reported.

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