Extrasolar planet imaging

Antoine Labeyrie; Herve Le Coroller

doi:10.1117/12.550071

20 October 2004 Extrasolar planet imaging

Antoine Labeyrie, Herve Le Coroller

Proceedings Volume 5491, New Frontiers in Stellar Interferometry; (2004) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.550071
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2004, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Abstract

The coronagraphic techniques serving to reject most light from a star, when trying to image a nearby planet, can be pushed with an adaptive holographic element. Located after the coronagraph, it can in principle remove most of the residual star light by adding a phase-shifted holographic reconstruction of it . The scheme is also usable within each sub-aperture of a diluted hypertelescope array, sufficiently large to resolve details of an exo-Earth. A possible panoramic version of the previously mentioned Exo-Earth Imager is shaped as a virtual bubble of 400 km diameter , consisting of thousands of 3-meter mirrors, free-flying and arranged co-spherically. The half-size focal sphere is explored by beam combiners, one for each exo-Earth observed within tens of parsecs. Each beam-combiner includes a kilometer-sized corrector of spherical aberration at F/2, which is also diluted and consisting of small free-flyers. The instrument is expected to provide direct coronagraphic images of exo-Earths, resolved in 50x50 resels, with enough dynamic range obtained in 30mn exposures to search colored features and their seasonal variations, indicative of photosynthetic life .

Citation Download Citation

Antoine Labeyrie and Herve Le Coroller "Extrasolar planet imaging", Proc. SPIE 5491, New Frontiers in Stellar Interferometry, (20 October 2004); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.550071

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