Progress on the occulter experiment at Princeton

Eric Cady; Kunjithapatham Balasubramanian; Michael Carr; Matthew Dickie; Pierre Echternach; Tyler Groff; Jeremy Kasdin; Christian Laftchiev; Michael McElwain; Dan Sirbu; Robert Vanderbei; Victor White

doi:10.1117/12.826359

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19 August 2009 Progress on the occulter experiment at Princeton

Eric Cady, Kunjithapatham Balasubramanian, Michael Carr, Matthew Dickie, Pierre Echternach, Tyler Groff, Jeremy Kasdin, Christian Laftchiev, Michael McElwain, Dan Sirbu, Robert Vanderbei, Victor White

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Proceedings Volume 7440, Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets IV; 744006 (2009) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.826359
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2009, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

An occulter is used in conjunction with a separate telescope to suppress the light of a distant star. To demonstrate the performance of this system, we are building an occulter experiment in the laboratory at Princeton. This experiment will use an etched silicon mask as the occulter, with some modifications to try to improve the performance. The occulter is illuminated by a diverging laser beam to reduce the aberrations from the optics before the occulter. We present the progress of this experiment and expectations for future work.

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Eric Cady, Kunjithapatham Balasubramanian, Michael Carr, Matthew Dickie, Pierre Echternach, Tyler Groff, Jeremy Kasdin, Christian Laftchiev, Michael McElwain, Dan Sirbu, Robert Vanderbei, and Victor White "Progress on the occulter experiment at Princeton", Proc. SPIE 7440, Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets IV, 744006 (19 August 2009); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.826359

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