Demonstration Of Synthetic Exo-earth Detection In The Lab With Speckle Subtraction Techniques

Details Demonstration Of Synthetic Exo-earth Detection In The Lab With Speckle Subtraction Techniques Demonstration Of Synthetic Exo-earth Detection In The Lab With Speckle Subtraction Techniques

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...21113519b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #135.19; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.975

Physics

Optics

Scientific paper

The problem of detecting and imaging earth-like exoplanets is hampered by the fact that wavefront error in the optics of a space telescope creates a speckle pattern that can swamp the exoplanet. The standard approach for dealing with speckles is to suppress them below the planet level by a deformable mirror using a wavefront control algorithm. However, such wavefront control may take a long time to achieve speckle suppression of 1010, the nominal contrast necessary for exo-earths, especially if the target star is dim. Furthermore, a very precise deformable mirror and electronics are required. In this paper, we present and demonstrate in the lab a method to detect planet light from amidst a brighter speckle pattern (as long as that pattern is stable), thus relaxing the requirement of 1010 speckle suppression. Furthermore, our detection is simultaneous with wavefront control and uses all the images taken in the course of wavefront control, saving valuable mission time. The method consists of (a) using the wavefront control estimate of the coherent speckle field to separate the speckles from the incoherent planet light, and (b) using a matched filter to reduce noise. No motion or rotation of the telescope is required for this method. The experiment was conducted on the High Contrast Imaging Testbed at the Jet Propulsion Lab using the Shaped Pupil coronagraph under 10% optical bandwidth.
This work was funded in part by JPL contract 1254357 and the Michelson Science Center, and carried out in part at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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