The low-order wavefront sensor for the PICTURE-C mission

The PICTURE-C mission will fly a 60 cm off-axis unobscured telescope and two high-contrast coronagraphs in successive high-altitude balloon flights with the goal of directly imaging and spectrally characterizing visible scattered light from exozodiacal dust in the interior 1-10 AU of nearby exoplanetary systems. The first flight in 2017 will use a 10[superscript -4] visible nulling coronagraph (previously flown on the PICTURE sounding rocket) and the second flight in 2019 will use a 10[superscript -7] vector vortex coronagraph. A low-order wavefront corrector (LOWC) will be used in both flights to remove time-varying aberrations from the coronagraph wavefront. The LOWC actuator is a 76-channel high-stroke deformable mirror packaged on top of a tip-tilt stage. This paper will detail the selection of a complementary high-speed, low-order wavefront sensor (LOWFS) for the mission. The relative performance and feasibility of several LOWFS designs will be compared including the Shack-Hartmann, Lyot LOWFS, and the curvature sensor. To test the different sensors, a model of the time-varying wavefront is constructed using measured pointing data and inertial dynamics models to simulate optical alignment perturbations and surface deformation in the balloon environment.United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NNX15AG23G S01

End-to-end simulation of high-contrast imaging systems: methods and results for the PICTURE mission family

We describe a set of numerical approaches to modeling the performance of space flight high-contrast imaging payloads. Mission design for high-contrast imaging requires numerical wavefront error propagation to ensure accurate component specifications. For constructed instruments, wavelength and angle-dependent throughput and contrast models allow detailed simulations of science observations, allowing mission planners to select the most productive science targets. The PICTURE family of missions seek to quantify the optical brightness of scattered light from extrasolar debris disks via several high-contrast imaging techniques: sounding rocket (the Planet Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Rocket Experiment) and balloon flights of a visible nulling coronagraph, as well as a balloon flight of a vector vortex coronagraph (the Planetary Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment-Coronagraph, PICTURE-C). The rocket mission employs an on-axis 0.5m Gregorian telescope, while the balloon flights will share an unobstructed off-axis 0.6m Gregorian. This work details the flexible approach to polychromatic, end-to-end physical optics simulations used for both the balloon vector vortex coronagraph and rocket visible nulling coronagraph missions. We show the preliminary PICTURE-C telescope and vector vortex coronagraph design will achieve 10 -8 contrast without post-processing as limited by realistic optics, but not considering polarization or low-order errors. Simulated science observations of the predicted warm ring around Epsilon Eridani illustrate the performance of both missions

Radiometric Calibration of a Dual-Wavelength, Full-Waveform Terrestrial Lidar

Radiometric calibration of the Dual-Wavelength Echidna® Lidar (DWEL), a full-waveform terrestrial laser scanner with two simultaneously-pulsing infrared lasers at 1064 nm and 1548 nm, provides accurate dual-wavelength apparent reflectance (ρapp), a physically-defined value that is related to the radiative and structural characteristics of scanned targets and independent of range and instrument optics and electronics. The errors of ρapp are 8.1% for 1064 nm and 6.4% for 1548 nm. A sensitivity analysis shows that ρapp error is dominated by range errors at near ranges, but by lidar intensity errors at far ranges. Our semi-empirical model for radiometric calibration combines a generalized logistic function to explicitly model telescopic effects due to defocusing of return signals at near range with a negative exponential function to model the fall-off of return intensity with range. Accurate values of ρapp from the radiometric calibration improve the quantification of vegetation structure, facilitate the comparison and coupling of lidar datasets from different instruments, campaigns or wavelengths and advance the utilization of bi- and multi-spectral information added to 3D scans by novel spectral lidars