Significant optical engineering advances at the University of Arizona are being made for
design, fabrication, and construction of next generation astronomical telescopes. This …

Great strides have been made in recent years toward the goal of high-contrast imaging with
a sensitivity adequate to detect earth-like planets around nearby stars. It appears that the …

In this paper we describe the complex electric field reconstruction from image plane intensity
measurements for high contrast coronagraphic imaging. A deformable mirror (DM) surface is …

Coronagraphy is a very promising method for directly imaging exoplanets, but the
performance of a coronagraph is highly sensitive to quasi-static aberrations within the …

Hybrid Lyot Coronagraph (HLC) is one of the two operating modes of the Wide-Field
InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) coronagraph instrument. Since being selected by …

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is a NASA observatory concept, now in
phase A study, which is designed to perform wide-field imaging and slitless spectroscopic …

We summarize the current best polychromatic (∼ 10% to 20% bandwidth) contrast
performance demonstrated in the laboratory by different starlight suppression approaches …

For imaging faint exoplanets and disks, a coronagraph-equipped observatory needs focal
plane wavefront correction to recover high contrast. The most efficient correction methods …

Detection and characterization of Earth-like planets around nearby stars using the direct
imaging technique is a key scientific objective of future NASA astrophysics flagship …

NASA WFIRST-AFTA mission study includes a coronagraph instrument to find and
characterize exoplanets. Various types of masks could be employed to suppress the host …