Abstract
AbstractAnalysis of a 1.5 meter diameter High Altitude Balloon Circumstellar Imaging Telescope (HABCIT) indicates that it offers a fast and low cost path to direct detection of extra-solar planets. Above an altitude of about 30 kilometers, scatter in the visible due to the atmosphere is more than 1000 times smaller than the diffraction sidelobes for a 1.5 meter telescope at 1 arcsecond in the visible. This permits a thousandfold reduction in the total background against which the planet must be detected. By flying a scatter compensated 1.5 meter telescope and high efficiency coronagraph on a balloon platform, a very near term and low cost opportunity exists to achieve exciting scientific results and technology demonstrations. For a thousandfold reduction in the background, a Jupiter like planet could be detected around more than 70 stars with an average integration time of 16 hours. For the very nearest stars complete planetary systems can be characterized down to nearly Earth sized planets, over a range of orbital distances (1-5 AU).
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