Exploration of Millisecond Exposures for Exoplanet Imaging

系外行星成像毫秒曝光的探索

• 批准号: 1600138
• 负责人: Richard Frazin
• 金额: $ 30万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-05-01 至 2023-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1600138&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Exploration; Millisecond; Exposures; Exoplanet; Imaging

This proposal will perform the exploratory work needed to develop millisecond imaging technologies as a viable tool for ultra-high contrast astronomy. The direct application of this work is to the development and utilization of the next generation of extremely large telescopes, currently under construction, that will be involved in direct imaging and characterization of extra-solar planets. The discovery, classification, and characterization of extra-solar planets has stirred the imagination of lay people and professional astronomers alike. The discovery and characterization of an earth like planet, with atmospheric chemical signatures of life processes, would have a profound impact on humanity.Adaptive Optics (AO) systems have made significant improvements in both the imaging spatial resolution and contrast available to ground-based telescopes. Although an AO system attempts to fully correct for atmospheric-induced wavefront distortions, a real-world AO system does an imperfect job, resulting in the "AO residual", a set of speckles in the image plane that appear and disappear at millisecond time-scales. It has been shown that these speckles are a major limitation to high-contrast imaging, such as that involved in directly imaging exoplanets. In the proposed formulation, the science camera operates synchronously with the wavefront sensor (WFS), so that the science camera records a speckle pattern that corresponds to the wavefront measured by the WFS. The resulting millisecond exposures provide an information-rich dataset containing a random AO residual, measured by the WFS, that effectively interrogates the optical system and provides new information about the "non-common path aberrations", which, when corrected, can significantly improve ultra-high contract astronomical imaging.

该提案将进行必要的探索工作，以开发毫秒成像技术，作为超高对比度天文学的可行工具。这项工作的直接应用是开发和利用目前正在建造的下一代超大望远镜，这些望远镜将参与太阳系外行星的直接成像和定性。太阳系外行星的发现、分类和特征描述激发了外行人和专业天文学家的想象力。自适应光学（AO）系统在成像空间分辨率和对比度上都有了显著的提高，它的出现将对人类产生深远的影响。虽然AO系统试图完全校正大气引起的波前畸变，但现实世界的AO系统做得并不完美，导致“AO残余”，即图像平面中以毫秒时间尺度出现和消失的一组散斑。已经表明，这些斑点是高对比度成像的主要限制，例如直接成像系外行星。在所提出的配方中，科学相机与波前传感器（WFS）同步操作，使得科学相机记录对应于由WFS测量的波前的散斑图案。由此产生的毫秒曝光提供了一个信息丰富的数据集，其中包含由WFS测量的随机AO残差，该数据集有效地询问光学系统并提供有关“非公共路径像差”的新信息，当校正时，可以显着改善超高合同天文成像。