Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21347518c&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #475.18; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.438
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Anticipating NASA's reinvigoration of suborbital programs, we present a quantitative analysis of seeing in the stratosphere and its implications for direct detection of mature exoplanets using a visible-wavelength, coronagraphic telescope onboard a balloon platform. We analyze two sources of dynamic wavefront perturbations: turbulence in the free atmosphere and locally generated turbulence. This paper concentrates on the former, as the local-seeing measurement and analysis results are detailed in a previous paper1. Using published, space-borne observations of optical inhomogeneities in the stratosphere, we calculate speckle intensities arising from aberrations of stellar wavefronts propagating through the atmosphere above a balloon-borne observatory. Specifically, we demonstrate that the inner scale of turbulence is critically important in determining speckle intensities for planet-star separations greater than 0.1 arcsecond. Therefore, a turbulence model such as the Hill-Andrews spectrum is required to account for the effects of the inner scale. Results derived from the (conventional) Komolgorov, von Karman, and Hill-Andrews spectra are presented vis-á-vis requirements of Planetscope, a balloon-borne coronagraph concept that would directly characterize known extrasolar planets and debris disks around nearby stars.
Footnotes
1 Traub, WA; Chen, P; Kern B. "Planetscope: An Exoplanet Coronagraph on a Balloon Platform.” Proceedings of the SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering, 7010(70103S), DOI:10.1117/12.788087
Chen Pin
Kern Brian D.
Matsuo Takeshi
Traub Wesley A.
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