Design of a Space-Borne, Mid-IR Exoplanet Imager

Details Design of a Space-Borne, Mid-IR Exoplanet Imager Design of a Space-Borne, Mid-IR Exoplanet Imager

Apr 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011dda....42.1011k&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #42, #10.11; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

This poster describes a novel design for a space-borne system capable of producing multi-pixel, mid-IR images of a class of exosolar planets. Our design considerations focus on "super-Earths” in the habitable zones of M-class stars. This stellar class is the most abundant and the
contrast ratio in the mid infrared for habitable zone super-Earths is most favorable. Although such planets will be tidally locked, recent studies have suggested that atmospheric collapse on the dark side may not occur and conditions favorable to life may exist near the terminators. The goal of the design is to create images having 20 pixels across the diameter of planets within 10 parsecs of Earth. To obtain unblurred images, the total imaging time must be less than 1/20th the planet rotation period. The tidally locked condition helps us meet this requirement since the orbital/rotational period is some tens of days. The resulting design consists of a constellation of 24 light collecting units located near the Earth-Sun L2 libration point. Each light collector is a truss-mounted Bracewell interferometer for starlight nulling, the output of which (containing only planet emissions) is recorded by a photodetector. Digitized photodetector data from all light collecting units is then transmitted and processed to compute the image using the Intensity Correlation Imaging (ICI) approach. ICI technology exploits the Brown-Twiss effect to produce ultra-fine resolution images with spatially distributed light collecting apertures. While greatly extending the sensitivity of the Brown-Twiss effect, ICI offers many advantageous features for planet imaging. It does not require the propagation of collected light beams to combiner units. Nor does it require nanometer-level control of, nor knowledge of the relative positions of the collector units. We show that high definition images, 20 pixels across the diameter, can be produced in a day with a static arrangement of collector units.

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