TY - JOUR
T1 - Wavefront sensing in space
T2 - Flight demonstration II of the PICTURE sounding rocket payload
AU - Douglas, Ewan S.
AU - Mendillo, Christopher B.
AU - Cook, Timothy A.
AU - Cahoy, Kerri L.
AU - Chakrabarti, Supriya
N1 - Funding Information:
The PICTURE-B team would like to thank the NASA Sounding Rocket Program Office, the Wallops Flight Facility, and the Orbital ATK NSROC II team for their support, particularly our mission managers: Christine Escobar and David Jennings. We are also deeply indebted to everyone in the WSMR Naval Research Rocket Support Office and NMSU Physical Science Laboratory teams for their leadership and assistance. This work was supported by NASA grants NNG05WC17G, NNX11AD53G, NNX13AD50G, NNX15AG23G, and through graduate fellowships awarded to E.S. Douglas by the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium. Computing resources were provided by two interfaces to the Massachusetts Green Computing Facility: MIT Research Computing and the Boston University Scientific Computing Cluster. Special thanks to Brian A. Hicks of NASA Goddard Space Flight Facility, Benjamin F. Lane of MIT Draper Laboratory, and Shanti Rao and J. Kent Wallace of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Boston University Scientific Instrument Facility worked tirelessly to support integration of both PICTURE payloads. Paul Bierden, Charles Conway, and the rest of the staff of Boston Micromachines Corporation provided invaluable support to this project. The staff at AOA Xinetics Northrop Grumman and John G. Daly of Vector Engineering provided essential support to the refurbishment of the flight telescope. E.S.D. would especially like to thank Catherine Espaillat, Alan Marscher, Donald W. McCarthy, and Michael Mendillo for their valuable input. This research made use of community-developed core Python packages, including Astropy,58 Matplotlib,59 SciPy,38 and the IPython Interactive Computing architecture.60 Additional data analyses were done using IDL (Exelis Visual Information Solutions, Boulder, Colorado). This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - A NASA sounding rocket for high-contrast imaging with a visible nulling coronagraph, the Planet Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Rocket Experiment (PICTURE) payload, has made two suborbital attempts to observe the warm dust disk inferred around Epsilon Eridani. The first flight in 2011 demonstrated a 5 mas fine pointing system in space. The reduced flight data from the second launch, on November 25, 2015, presented herein, demonstrate active sensing of wavefront phase in space. Despite several anomalies in flight, postfacto reduction phase stepping interferometer data provide insight into the wavefront sensing precision and the system stability for a portion of the pupil. These measurements show the actuation of a 32 × 32-actuator microelectromechanical system deformable mirror. The wavefront sensor reached a median precision of 1.4 nm per pixel, with 95% of samples between 0.8 and 12.0 nm per pixel. The median system stability, including telescope and coronagraph wavefront errors other than tip, tilt, and piston, was 3.6 nm per pixel, with 95% of samples between 1.2 and 23.7 nm per pixel.
AB - A NASA sounding rocket for high-contrast imaging with a visible nulling coronagraph, the Planet Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Rocket Experiment (PICTURE) payload, has made two suborbital attempts to observe the warm dust disk inferred around Epsilon Eridani. The first flight in 2011 demonstrated a 5 mas fine pointing system in space. The reduced flight data from the second launch, on November 25, 2015, presented herein, demonstrate active sensing of wavefront phase in space. Despite several anomalies in flight, postfacto reduction phase stepping interferometer data provide insight into the wavefront sensing precision and the system stability for a portion of the pupil. These measurements show the actuation of a 32 × 32-actuator microelectromechanical system deformable mirror. The wavefront sensor reached a median precision of 1.4 nm per pixel, with 95% of samples between 0.8 and 12.0 nm per pixel. The median system stability, including telescope and coronagraph wavefront errors other than tip, tilt, and piston, was 3.6 nm per pixel, with 95% of samples between 1.2 and 23.7 nm per pixel.
KW - Active optics
KW - Debris disks
KW - Deformable mirrors
KW - Direct imaging
KW - Exoplanets
KW - Exozodi
KW - High-contrast imaging
KW - Interferometry
KW - Sounding rockets
KW - Visible nulling coronagraph
KW - Wavefront sensing
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U2 - 10.1117/1.JATIS.4.1.019003
DO - 10.1117/1.JATIS.4.1.019003
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85044028916
VL - 4
JO - Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems
JF - Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems
SN - 2329-4124
IS - 1
M1 - 019003
ER -