High precision astrometry with a Diffractive Pupil Telescope

Details High precision astrometry with a Diffractive Pupil Telescope High precision astrometry with a Diffractive Pupil Telescope

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21915518b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #155.18

Physics

Optics

Scientific paper

A concept for high precision astrometry with a conventional wide field telescope is presented, enabling a space telescope to perform simultaneously coronagraphic imaging of exoplanets, astrometric measurement of their orbits and masses, and deep wide field imaging for a wide range of astrophysical investigations. The diffractive pupil telescope uses a regular grid of small sub millimeter spots on the primary mirror coating to produce wide field images containing both a large number of background stars and faint diffraction spikes emanating from the central bright star. The diffraction spikes encode instrumental astrometric distortions due to optics or the detector, allowing precise measurement of the central star against a large number of faint background stars.
With up to a few percent of the primary mirror area covered by the dots, the fraction of the central starlight located in the diffraction spikes is kept sufficiently small to allow full sensitivity deep imaging over the telescope's field of view. Since the dots are regularly spaced, they do not diffract light at small angular separations, and therefore allow full coronagraphic imaging capability. We show that combining simultaneous astrometric and coronagraphic measurements allows improved detection and characterization of exoplanets by constraining the planet(s) characteristics with both measurements. Our preliminary astrometric accuracy error budget shows that sub-micro arcsecond astrometry can be achieved with a 1.4 m diameter telescope, and that astrometric accuracy improves rapidly with telescope diameter. At the University of Arizona, we have constructed a scaled-down testbed to demonstrate the concept with a diffractive pupil and a simulated star field in the laboratory.

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