Flight Demonstration of a Milli-Arcsecond Optical Pointing System for Direct Exoplanet Imaging

Details Flight Demonstration of a Milli-Arcsecond Optical Pointing System for Direct Exoplanet Imaging Flight Demonstration of a Milli-Arcsecond Optical Pointing System for Direct Exoplanet Imaging

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21944603m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #446.03

Computer Science

Sound

Scientific paper

The PICTURE (Planetary Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Rocket Experiment) sounding rocket attempted to use a white-light nulling interferometer to image the exozodiacal dust disk of Epsilon Eridani (K2V, 3.22 pc) in reflected visible light down to an inner radius of 3 AU. PICTURE launched from White Sands Missile Range on October 8th, 2011. Unfortunately, the main science telemetry channel was lost seconds into flight and no science data was recovered. However, on-board diagnostic data does show that PICTURE successfully demonstrated a fast (200 Hz) optical tracking system that provided 2 milli-arcsecond in-flight pointing stability, a thousand-fold improvement over the raw pointing of the rocket's attitude control system (ACS). The PICTURE flight provides heritage for a technology that will be a key component for many future direct exoplanet imaging missions.
We present a spectral analysis of the 200 Hz tracking data in comparison to the 50 Hz ACS gyro data and we provide a precise measurement of the true ACS performance at frequencies higher than 5 Hz where the ACS gyros become noise limited. This work is funded by NASA grant: NNG05WC17G.

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