A Coronagraph with a Band-limited Mask for Finding Terrestrial Planets

By M. Kuchner, Wesley A. Traub. 2002

268 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Several recent designs for planet-finding telescopes use coronagraphs operating at visible wavelengths to suppress starlight along the telescope's optical axis while transmitting any off-axis light from circumstellar material. We describe a class of graded coronagraphic image masks that can, in principle, provide perfect elimination of on-axis light, while simultaneously maximizing the Lyot stop throughput and angular resolution. These "band-limited" masks operate on the intensity of light in the image plane, not the phase. They can work with almost any entrance pupil shape, provided that the entrance pupil transmissivity is uniform, and can be combined with an apodized Lyot stop to reduce the sensitivity of the coronagraph to imperfections in the image mask. We discuss some practical limitations on the dynamic range of coronagraphs in the context of a space-based terrestrial-planet finder telescope and emphasize that fundamentally, the optical problem of imaging planets around nearby stars is a matter of precision fabrication and control, not Fraunhofer diffraction theory.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/28cf115ea599c5b9da87c9b4dc6f4133fc6bdfbc

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Citations in the corpus

Wide-Field InfrarRed Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets WFIRST-AFTA 2015 Report (2015, background): “This transmission profile is band-limited in spatial frequency, so that field cancellation in selective regions of the Lyot plane is much deeper than the classical case, as well as achieving a smaller inner working angle (Kuchner & Traub 2002).”
Imaging Spectroscopy for Extrasolar Planet Detection (2002, background): “There has been a great deal of work devoted to improving the performance of coronagraphs with a multitude of analog methods and data analysis techniques (e.g., Roddier & Roddier 1997; Rouan et al. 2000; Spergel & Kasdin 2001; Kuchner & Traub 2002; and many others).”
Optimal Occulter Design for Finding Extrasolar Planets (2007, background): “Subject headinggs: instrumentation: high angular resolution — planetary systems”
Apodized Pupil Lyot Coronagraphs for Arbitrary Telescope Apertures (2004, methodology): “An opposite approach is to use a clear aperture and instead modify the shape of the wave diffracted by the mask to be a flat function in a reduced part of the aperture (Kuchner & Traub 2002).”
Theoretical Limits on Extrasolar Terrestrial Planet Detection with Coronagraphs (2006, methodology): “For the VNC/BL4(2), it was assumed that the preferential direction of the coronagraph was optimally aligned with the system orientation.”
Optical interferometry in astronomy (2003, background): “New clever designs in coronagraphy are competing with nulling interferometry for space mission concepts to detect terrestial planets around other stars, and I recommend interesting papers on optimally-shaped and apodized pupils (Spergel, 2002; Nisenson and Papaliolios, 2001), bandpass-limited image-”
Phase-induced amplitude apodization of telescope pupils for extrasolar terrestrial planet imaging (2003, background): “The phase of the exit wavefront (the apodized wavefront in case of the PIAA and CPA techniques) needs to be flat to within approximatelyλ/3000 for efficient ETPs detection (Kuchner & Traub, 2002).”
High-Contrast Imaging from Space: Speckle Nulling in a Low-Aberration Regime (2005, methodology): “For image-plane coronagraphs with band-limited sinc masks (Kuchner & Traub 2002, x 4), we estimate this variation to be of the order of 10%, assuming ¼ 0:1 and 64 actuators.”
Broadband wavefront correction algorithm for high-contrast imaging systems (2007, unknown): “ā = ⎡ ⎣ {WG} · · · {WG} ⎤ ⎦ −1 ⎡ ⎣ {iWEab} · · · {iWEab} ⎤ ⎦ (13)”
EXOPLANET ALBEDO SPECTRA AND COLORS AS A FUNCTION OF PLANET PHASE, SEPARATION, AND METALLICITY (2010, background): “Examples of some current direct imaging methods include high-performance coronagraphs (Kuchner & Traub 2002; Kasdin et al. 2003; Guyon et al. 2005; Trauger & Traub 2007; Mawet et al. 2009), external occulters (Cash 2006), and optical nullers (Wallace et al. 2000; Martin Levine et al. 2006), as well…”