The low-order wavefront control system for the PICTURE-C mission: preliminary testbed results from the Shack-Hartmann sensor

Glenn A. Howe; Christopher B. Mendillo; Kuravi Hewawasam; Jason Martel; Susanna C. Finn; Timothy A. Cook; Supriya Chakrabarti

doi:10.1117/12.2274122

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1 September 2017 The low-order wavefront control system for the PICTURE-C mission: preliminary testbed results from the Shack-Hartmann sensor

Glenn A. Howe, Christopher B. Mendillo, Kuravi Hewawasam, Jason Martel, Susanna C. Finn, Timothy A. Cook, Supriya Chakrabarti

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Proceedings Volume 10400, Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets VIII; 104001Z (2017) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2274122
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2017, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

The Planetary Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment - Coronagraph (PICTURE-C) mission will directly image debris disks and exozodiacal dust around three nearby stars from a high-altitude balloon using a vector vortex coronagraph. We present experimental results of the PICTURE-C low-order wavefront control (LOWFC) system utilizing a Shack-Hartmann (SH) sensor in an instrument testbed. The SH sensor drives both the alignment of the telescope secondary mirror using a 6-axis Hexapod and a surface parallel array deformable mirror to remove residual low-order aberrations. The sensor design and actuator calibration methods are discussed and the preliminary LOWFC closed-loop performance is shown to stabilize a reference wavefront to an RMS error of 0.30 ± 0.29 nm.

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Glenn A. Howe, Christopher B. Mendillo, Kuravi Hewawasam, Jason Martel, Susanna C. Finn, Timothy A. Cook, and Supriya Chakrabarti "The low-order wavefront control system for the PICTURE-C mission: preliminary testbed results from the Shack-Hartmann sensor", Proc. SPIE 10400, Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets VIII, 104001Z (1 September 2017); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2274122

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