Terrestrial Planet Finder coronagraph

Ford, Virginia G.; Hull, Anthony B.; Shaklan, Stuart; Levine, Marie; White, Mary L.; Lowman, Andrew E.; Cohen, E. J.

doi:10.1117/12.512633

Cited by 10 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Spatially resolving such signals would require multi-kilometric interferometers (Schneider et al 2010) and is likely to be several decades away from being realized. However, it will be possible to make spectroscopic observations of the unresolved planet-moon pair with facilities like the Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph (Ford et al 2004) or the 42m European Extremely Large Telescope (Diericks et al 2004), both of which are designed with the required sensitivity to detect Earth-sized planets. The combined light could then be resolved by subtracting the planet spectrum from the planet-moon spectrum during 'mutual events'; for example planet-moon eclipses or the disappearance of the moon in the shadow of the planet (Cabrera & Schneider 2007).…”

Section: Direct Imagingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pathways Towards Habitable Moons

Kipping,

Fossey,

Campanella

et al. 2009

Preprint

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The search for life outside of the Solar System should not be restricted to exclusively planetary bodies; large moons of extrasolar planets may also be common habitable environments throughout the Galaxy. Extrasolar moons, or exomoons, may be detected through transit timing effects induced onto the host planet as a result of mutual gravitational interaction. In particular, transit timing variations (TTV) and transit duration variations (TDV) are predicted to produce a unique exomoon signature, which is not only easily distinguished from other gravitational perturbations, but also provides both the period and mass of an exomoon. Using these timing effects, photometry greater or equal to that of the Kepler Mission is readily able to detect habitable-zone exomoons down to 0.2 M ⊕ and could survey up to 25,000 stars for Earth-mass satellites. We discuss future possibilities for spectral retrieval of such bodies and show that transmission spectroscopy with JWST should be able to detect molecular species with ∼ 30 transit events, in the best cases.

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Section: Direct Imagingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pathways Towards Habitable Moons

Kipping,

Fossey,

Campanella

et al. 2009

Preprint

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“…The Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph (TPF-C) is a high-precision optical system designed to directly detect the starlight reflected from planets orbiting nearby stars 1,2 . To achieve this challenging goal, the optical system provides a stable, high-quality wave front to the coronagraph.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optical design of the Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph starlight suppression system

Mouroulis

Shaklan

2005

SPIE Proceedings

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A baseline design for NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph (TPFC) starlight suppression system (SSS) is described. The design is based on a 8x3.5m elliptical aperture telescope leading to terrestrial planet detection at a minimum angle of ~4λ/D. The design accommodates classical Lyot coronagraph as well as shaped pupil approaches and includes separate optical paths for two polarizations each with its own deformable mirror control. Critical design challenges and trades are described.

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Speckle Statistics in Adaptively Corrected Images

Fitzgerald

Graham

2006

ApJ

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(abridged) Imaging observations are generally affected by a fluctuating background of speckles, a particular problem when detecting faint stellar companions at small angular separations. Knowing the distribution of the speckle intensities at a given location in the image plane is important for understanding the noise limits of companion detection. The speckle noise limit in a long-exposure image is characterized by the intensity variance and the speckle lifetime. In this paper we address the former quantity through the distribution function of speckle intensity. Previous theoretical work has predicted a form for this distribution function at a single location in the image plane. We developed a fast readout mode to take short exposures of stellar images corrected by adaptive optics at the ground-based UCO/Lick Observatory, with integration times of 5 ms and a time between successive frames of 14.5 ms ($\lambda=2.2$ $\mu$m). These observations temporally oversample and spatially Nyquist sample the observed speckle patterns. We show, for various locations in the image plane, the observed distribution of speckle intensities is consistent with the predicted form. Additionally, we demonstrate a method by which $I_c$ and $I_s$ can be mapped over the image plane. As the quantity $I_c$ is proportional to the PSF of the telescope free of random atmospheric aberrations, this method can be used for PSF calibration and reconstruction.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, ApJ accepte

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Terrestrial Planet Finder coronagraph

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Pathways Towards Habitable Moons

Pathways Towards Habitable Moons

Optical design of the Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph starlight suppression system

Speckle Statistics in Adaptively Corrected Images

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