Kavli Affiliate: Bruce Macintosh
| First 5 Authors: Kyle Van Gorkom, Ramya M. Anche, Christopher B. Mendillo, Jessica Gersh-Range, Justin Hom
| Summary:
NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) concept and the 2020 Decadal
Survey’s recommendation to develop a large space telescope to "detect and
characterize Earth-like extrasolar planets" requires new starlight suppression
technologies to probe a variety of biomarkers across multiple wavelengths.
Broadband absorption due to ozone dominates Earth’s spectrum in the
mid-ultraviolet (200-300 nm) and can be detected with low spectral resolution.
Despite the high value of direct ultraviolet (UV) exoplanet observations,
high-contrast coronagraph demonstrations have yet to be performed in the UV.
Typical coronagraph leakage sources such as wavefront error, surface scatter,
polarization aberrations, and coronagraph mask quality all become more
significant in the UV and threaten the viability of HWO to produce meaningful
science in this regime. As a first step toward a demonstration of UV
coronagraphy in a laboratory environment, we develop an end-to-end model to
produce performance predictions and a contrast budget for a vacuum testbed
operating at wavelengths from 200-400nm. At 300nm, our model predicts testbed
performance of ${sim}3times10^{-9}$ contrast in a narrow 2% bandwidth and
$lessapprox10^{-8}$ in a 5% bandwidth, dominated primarily by the chromatic
residuals from surface errors on optics that are not conjugate to the pupil.
| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”Bruce Macintosh”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=3