Progress in developing PICTURE-D polarimeter: a polarimeter for characterizing debris disk properties

Abstract

We present progress in the development of the PICTURE-D polarimeter, an auxilliary optical instrument of the Planetary Imaging Coronagraph Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment Debris Disk (PICTURE-D) mission designed for the purpose of characterizing debris disk properties. There are several technical milestones we want to achieve with this polarimeter: 1. We intend to measure both orthogonal polarization states on the sky simultaneously, something that was limited by PICTURE-D’s predecessor PICTURE-C due to polarization leakage filtering. 2. We intend to use phase-diversity in the polarization images to perform electric field aberration retrieval in the pupil plane, based on existing literature that describes the algorithm and theory. In this manuscript we describe the progress we have made regarding building the polarimeter and our attempts to implement the polarization phase diversity-based wavefront sensing.

Authors 3

1. G. C. Yu

   University of Massachusetts Lowell

   Affiliation as printed

   Univ. of Massachusetts Lowell (United States)

2. Christopher B. Mendillo

   University of Massachusetts Lowell

   Affiliation as printed

   Univ. of Massachusetts Lowell (United States)

3. David S. Doelman Aachen SRON Space Research Organisation Netherlands

   Space Research Organisation Netherlands

   Affiliation as printed

   SRON Space Research Organisation Netherlands (Netherlands)