Exploration of Millisecond Exposures for Exoplanet Imaging

这项提议将开展所需的探索性工作，将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型望远镜，该望远镜将涉及对太阳系外行星的直接成像和表征。太阳系外行星的发现、分类和表征激起了外行人和专业天文学家的想象力。具有生命过程大气化学特征的类地行星的发现和表征将对人类产生深远的影响。自适应光学(AO)系统已经在地面望远镜的成像空间分辨率和对比度方面取得了重大改进。尽管光学系统试图完全校正大气引起的波前扭曲，但现实世界的光学系统做得并不完美，导致了图像平面上的一组斑点在毫秒级的时间尺度上出现和消失。已经证明，这些散斑是高对比度成像的主要限制，例如直接为系外行星成像的成像。在提出的公式中，科学相机与波前传感器(WFS)同步运行，因此科学相机记录与WFS测量的波前相对应的散斑图案。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了光学系统，并提供了有关“非公共路径像差”的新信息，经过校正后，可以显著改善超高收缩天文成像。

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.