Paper 14145-72
Paper 14145-72
The Space Coronagraph Optical Bench (SCoOB): 10. dark zone maintenance for space-based high contrast imaging testbed
9 July 2026 • 11:50 - 12:10 CEST | Room B4-M3
Abstract
The detection and characterization of Earth-like exoplanets is one of the key scientific goals of future space observatories. Achieving this requires starlight suppression at contrasts of the order of 10-10. Maintaining these contrasts over long integration times is essential to image faint planets. In practice, this is challenging due to the mechanical instabilities and thermal gradients within the telescope that give rise to quasi-static wavefront errors. Dark Zone Maintenance (DZM) techniques can mitigate these effects by stabilizing the wavefront in realtime. We present the results from simulations of an extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based DZM algorithm implemented on a model of SCoOB (a vector vortex coronagraph with a charge-6 vector vortex wave plate and Kilo-C DM) to maintain the contrast at ~10-8 within a one-sided dark hole from 3–10 lambda/D in the presence of injected drifts and the latest results from the testbed.
Presenter
The Univ. of Arizona (United States)
Saraswathi is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Arizona Space Astrophysics Lab (UASAL). She completed her PhD from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics where she worked on Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics systems for the solar telescopes. She is interested in the design, development and characterization of AO systems, turbulence strength measurements, high contrast imaging systems and wavefront sensing and control.