Exploration of Millisecond Exposures for Exoplanet Imaging

该提案将执行开发毫秒成像技术所需的探索性工作，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、分类和特征激发了外行人和专业天文学家的想象力。发现并确定一颗类地行星的特征，以及生命过程的大气化学特征，将对人类产生深远的影响。自适应光学（AO）系统在成像空间分辨率和对比度方面取得了显著的进步。虽然AO系统试图完全纠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残差”，即图像平面上以毫秒时间尺度出现和消失的一组斑点。已经证明，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。在提出的方案中，科学相机与波前传感器（WFS）同步工作，因此科学相机记录的斑图与WFS测量的波前相对应。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，并提供了关于“非常见路径像差”的新信息，这些信息在校正后可以显着改善超高合约天文成像。

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.