Initial super-Nyquist wavefront control experiments in the Decadal Survey Testbed

2021
In order to characterize exoplanets around nearby stars, upcoming and proposed space telescopes are being designed with high contrast coronagraph instruments. Coronagraphs are generally designed to suppress only a single, on-axis star, but there are numerous binary star systems within our observational range. Multi-star wavefront correction (MSWC) is a technique that leverages non-redundant control modes around two stars to create a single dark zone in the image. In this paper we describe the implementation of MSWC in the Decadal Survey Testbed (DST) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We modified the open-source FALCO software package, which is used to run the DST, to enable sensing and control of multiple sources. To enable MSWC at large (i.e., super-Nyquist) angular separations, we modified the DST calibration procedure. We report our best achieved contrast and planned modifications to complete our future milestones.
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