The PICTURE-C MKID camera

Abstract

The Planetary Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment-Coronagraph (PICTURE-C) experiment is a balloon-borne observatory for high-contrast imaging of debris disks and exoplanets around nearby stars. This experiment will use a 10,000-pixel Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID) instrument as its science camera. The PICTURE-C MKID Camera is an integral field spectrograph (IFS) with a bandpass of λ = 540 − 660 nm that sits behind a modest adaptive optics system and coronagraph which promise to achieve contrast ratios down to 10-7 from 1.7 to 10 λ/D (0.35” to 2.1”). The MKIDs are photon counting detectors promising a resolution R up to 20 for the PICTURE-C mission. The ability to count photons with microsecond time resolution will allow the MKID camera to double as a Focal Plane Wavefront Sensor (FPWFS), helping to discriminate between speckles and circumstellar objects in real time and in post-processing. The intrinsic spectral resolution of the detectors will allow for further characterization of the debris disks and exoplanets around the stars targeted during its flight. The visible light observations taken with this instrument will complement infrared observations taken from the ground and serve to demonstrate MKIDs utility in a space-like environment. For this poster, we will introduce and discuss the PICTURE-C MKID Camera.