Polarization aberration analysis for the PICTURE-C exoplanetary coronagraph

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

doi:10.1117/1.JATIS.5.2.025003

14 May 2019 Polarization aberration analysis for the PICTURE-C exoplanetary coronagraph

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

Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, Vol. 5, Issue 2, 025003 (May 2019). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.5.2.025003

Abstract

The Planetary Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment - Coronagraph (PICTURE-C) mission will directly image debris disks and exozodiacal dust around nearby stars from a high-altitude balloon using a vector vortex coronagraph. One of the many starlight leakage sources that can degrade the performance of the coronagraph is polarization aberration induced by the reflective optical coatings. A polarization ray trace of the PICTURE-C telescope and coronagraph is combined with a physical optics wavefront propagation simulation to quantify the expected amount of coronagraph leakage due to polarization aberration. The simulations show the leakage is below the budgeted contrast of 1 × ^{10 − 8}.

Citation Download Citation

Christopher B. Mendillo, Glenn A. Howe, Kuravi Hewawasam, Jason Martel, Timothy A. Cook, and Supriya Chakrabarti "Polarization aberration analysis for the PICTURE-C exoplanetary coronagraph," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 5(2), 025003 (14 May 2019). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.5.2.025003

Received: 23 August 2018; Accepted: 8 April 2019; Published: 14 May 2019

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