The PICTURE-C exoplanetary imaging balloon mission: laboratory coronagraph demonstrations of high-contrast imaging and low-order wavefront control

Abstract

The Planetary Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment - Coronagraph (PICTURE-C) mission will directly image debris disks and exozodiacal dust around nearby stars from a high-altitude balloon using a vector vortex coronagraph. The first flight of PICTURE-C launched from the NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF) in Ft. Sumner, NM on September 28, 2019. This flight successfully demonstrated many key technologies for exoplanetary direct imaging missions and all hardware components for the second, sciencefocused flight of PICTURE-C, which had been scheduled for the fall of 2021, but was delayed due to inclement weather until 2022. We present laboratory demonstrations of the flight 2 coronagraph, which uses a high-order 952 actuator MEMS deformable mirror to create a high-contrast dark zone at the 10^-7 level. The performance of the low-order and high-order wavefront control systems is demonstrated and compared with model predictions.