Detection of Earth-like Planets Using Apodized Telescopes

By P. Nisenson, C. Papaliolios. 2001

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The mission of NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) is to find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars and characterize the atmospheres of these planets using spectroscopy. Because of the enormous brightness ratio between the star and the reflected light from the planet, techniques must be found to reduce the brightness of the star. The current favorite approach to doing this is with interferometry: interfering the light from two or more separated telescopes with a π phase shift, nulling out the starlight. While this technique can, in principle, achieve the required dynamic range, building a space interferometer that has the necessary characteristics poses immense technical difficulties. In this paper, we suggest a much simpler approach to achieving the required dynamic range. By simply adjusting the transmissive shape of a telescope aperture, the intensity in large regions around the stellar image can be reduced nearly to zero. This approach could lead to construction of a TPF using conventional technologies, requiring space optics on a much smaller scale than the current TPF approach.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09903589f65169d4f2bd49c5ee74fc193ef01905

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Biomedical Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

A Coronagraph with a Band-limited Mask for Finding Terrestrial Planets (2002, background): “To get around this stumbling block, some visible-light TPF designs invoke specially shaped pupils to separate starlight from planet light, or pupils with nonuniform transmissivity, (Nisenson & Papaliolios 2001; Spergel 2001; Kasdin, Spergel, & Littman 2001).”
Optical interferometry in astronomy (2003, background): “The Van Cittert–Zernike theorem (see Thompson et al (2001) for complete discussion and proof) relates the contrast of an interferometer’s fringes to a unique Fourier component of the impinging brightness distribution.”
Signature of life on exoplanets: Can Darwin produce false positive detections? (2002, background): “For the project TPF, an alternative option is to search for O2 in the visible range (Nisenson & Papaliolios 2001).”
Theoretical Limits on Extrasolar Terrestrial Planet Detection with Coronagraphs (2006, background): “…can be performed by a pupil plane amplitude mask (Conventional Pupil Apodization - CPA), which can be continuous (Jacquinot & Roisin-Dossier 1964; Nisenson & Papaliolios 2001; Gonsalves & Nisenson 2003; Aime 2005b) or binary (Kasdin et al. 2003; Vanderbei et al. 2003a,b, 2004; Aime 2005b).”
The Structure of High Strehl Ratio Point-Spread Functions (2003, background): “The idea of telescope apodization has been explored in several studies (e.g., Black (1980); Watson et al. (1991); Nisenson & Papaliolios (2001); Aime et al. (2002); Soummer et al. (2003)).”
Phase-induced amplitude apodization of telescope pupils for extrasolar terrestrial planet imaging (2003, background): “Many pupil apodization masks have been proposed for this purpose (Jacquinot & Roizen-Dossier, 1964, Nisenson & Papaliolios, 2001, Aime et al., 2001, Spergel, 2001, Kuchner & Traub, 2002), and optimization techniques to generate these masks have been developed (Gonsalves & Nisenson, 2002).”
Extrasolar Planet Finding via Optimal Apodized-Pupil and Shaped-Pupil Coronagraphs (2003, background): “Recently, Nisenson and Papaliolios (2001) proposed an apodized square aperture for TPF with separate apodizations in each direction, that is, A(y, z) = A1(y)A1(z).”
Stellar coronagraphy with prolate apodized circular apertures (2003, methodology): “The technique for a square aperture was also compared to the Apodized Square Aperture concept that considers apodization alone (Nisenson & Papaliolios 2001; Soummer et al. 2002b).”