Abstract
An exoplanet mission based on a high-altitude balloon is a next logical step in humanity’s quest to explore Earthlike planets in Earthlike orbits orbiting Sunlike stars. The mission described here is capable of spectrally imaging debris disks and exozodiacal light around a number of stars spanning a range of infrared excesses, stellar types, and ages. The mission is designed to characterize the background near those stars, to study the disks themselves, and to look for planets in those systems. The background light scattered and emitted from the disk is a key uncertainty in the mission design of any exoplanet direct imaging mission, thus, its characterization is critically important for future imaging of exoplanets.
Highlights
The study of exoplanets is one of the most exciting astronomical endeavors of our time
This paper describes one such mission, the Planetary Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment– Coronagraph (PICTURE C)
The PICTURE C optical system consists of a telescope, a loworder wavefront corrector (LOWC), and a vector vortex coronagraph (VVC)
Summary
The study of exoplanets is one of the most exciting astronomical endeavors of our time. Direct thermal emission from dust in the IR and starlight reflected by dust in the visible are the dominant astrophysical backgrounds against which exoplanets will be imaged Structures such as rings and clumps that form in exozodiacal clouds can both confound and benefit exoplanet observations. PICTURE C is the in a series of experiments that began with the PICTURE sounding rocket mission.[14] PICTURE used a visible nulling coronagraph (VNC) in conjunction with a 0.5 m on-axis Gregorian telescope in order to image the dust environment in the inner system of ε; Eri. The mission was launched on October 8, 2011, from White Sands Missile Range, but suffered a failure of the science data telemetry channel 80 s into flight. That sounding rocket flight is scheduled for the fall of 2015.16,17
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