| タイトル | Extra-Solar Planetary Imager (ESPI) for Space Based Jovian Planetary Detection |
| 著者（英） | Melnick, Gary J.; Papaliolios, Costa; Gezari, Dan Y.; Ridgeway, Steve; Nisenson, Peter; Harwit, Martin; Friedman, Edward; Graf, Paul; Lyon, Rick G. |
| 著者所属（英） | NASA Goddard Space Flight Center |
| 発行日 | 2002-01-01 |
| 言語 | eng |
| 内容記述 | We report on out Extra-Solar Planetary Imager (ESPI) study for a recent Midex (NASA Medium Class Explorer Mission) proposal. Proposed for ESPI was a 1.5 x 1.5 square meter Jacquinot apodized square aperture telescope. The combination of apodization and a square aperture telescope significantly reduces the diffracted light from a bright central source over much of the telescope focal plane. As a result, observations of very faint astronomical objects next to bright sources with angular separations as small as 0.32 arcseconds become possible. This permits a sensitive search for exo-planets in reflected light. The system is capable of detecting a Jupiter-like planet in a relatively long-period orbit around as many as 160 to 175 stars with a signal-to-noise ratio greater than 5 in observations lasting maximally 100 hours per star. We discuss the effects of wavefront error, mirror speckle, pointing error and signal-to-noise issues, as well as the scalability of our ESPI study with respect to NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder mission. |
| NASA分類 | Astronomy |
| 権利 | Copyright |
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