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Development and maturation of key technologies for direct imaging of exoplanetary systems
Schedule
5:45-6:30PM Networking
6:30-7:30PM Dinner
7:30-7:45PM NESOPTICA Annual Meeting Business
7:45-8:45PM Presentation
Registration is free for the presentation, either in person or on Zoom. Dinner, one hour before the talk, is an extra fee. For any issues or questions, please contact president@nesoptica.org.
Abstract
Primarily through indirect observational techniques, we have confirmed the existence of almost 5,000 exoplanetary systems. However, we still do not have an image of an exoplanetary system in reflected visible light. At UMass Lowell we have developed key technologies necessary for direct imaging of exoplanets and their environments and transitioned them from laboratory to near space using suborbital platforms. Two of our sounding rocket experiments, called PICTURE and PICTURE-B, carried a 0.5m dia Gregorian telescope, a Visible Nulling Coronagraph (VNC) operating in 600 – 750 nm, a 1024 channel Deformable Mirror (DM) and our own fine pointing system. The rocket flights demonstrated the suitability of these enabling technologies for space applications. Subsequently, we flew a high-altitude balloon called PICTURE-C twice in 2019 and 2022. It carried a telescope employing a 0.6m dia off-axis parabolic primary mirror, a Vector Vortex Coronagraph (VVC), a 97-channel low order DM and a 1024 element high order DM in the 540 – 660 nm wavelength range. The balloon flights demonstrated ~1 milliarcsecond fine pointing capability and produced the first on-sky dark hole – a region of low contrast region around a host star. In this talk I will describe the PICTURE series of experiments and the results.
Speakers Bio
Professor Supriya Chakrabarti received his undergraduate degree from the University of Calcutta and Ph. D. from the University of California, Berkeley. As a part of his Ph. D. dissertation, he built a sounding rocket payload containing five grazing incidence Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) instruments to study the aurora, participated in the development of a EUV/FUV spectrograph flown aboard the U. S. Air Force STP78-1 satellite for upper atmosphere and ionospheric studies and analyzed data from the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in terms of plasmaspheric Helium ion distribution.
His research interests include direct imaging of exoplanetary environments, upper atmospheric remote sensing using visible to ultraviolet hyperspectral imagery from ground and space platforms and full-waveform, near-IR lidar instrumentation for characterization of forest structures. He has supervised twelve Ph.D. students, edited/guest-edited nine books and conference proceedings, published over 200 articles and was awarded the 2016 George W. Goddard Award by the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Professor Chakrabarti directs the Lowell Center for Space Science and Technology (LoCSST) at University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he mentored a team of mostly undergraduate students who designed, built and flew a CubeSat in August 2021. Recently, LoCSST was selected to create Massachusetts Alliance for Space Technology and Sciences (MASTS), a small satellite design and test facility by Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.