The SPICA coronagraphic instrument (SCI) for the study of exoplanets
Section snippets
Background and scientific objective
We regard the systematic study of extra-solar planets (exoplanets) to be one of the most important tasks to be undertaken in space science in the near future. The enormous contrast between the parent star and the planet presents us with a serious problem. Therefore, there is a requirement for special instruments using techniques specifically designed to improve the contrast in order to perform a systematic observation of exoplanets. There are a number of different techniques currently used to
Specification
The specification of the instrument is summarized in Table 1. An overview of the current optical design of the SCI is shown in Fig. 2. The requirement that gives us the limiting short wavelength (3.5 μm) is derived for the direct detection and spectroscopy of Jovian exoplanets. As shown in Fig. 1, it is expected that the Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) of Jovian exoplanets has a peak in the 3.5–5 μm wavelength region (Burrows2003). So this wavelength region is one of the most appropriate
Key technologies
The SCI requires challenging technologies to realize high contrast for both imaging and spectroscopy over a wide MIR wavelength range. One of the critical technologies is the design, development and manufacture a coronagraph which can yield a high contrast PSF. We focused on a coronagraph using a 1-dimensional barcode mask (Enya and Abe, 2010) which is a type of binary shaped pupil mask (e.g., Vanderbei et al., 2004, Kasdin et al., 2005, Tanaka et al., 2006). Another key technology is the
Acknowledgments
We deeply thank and pay our respects to all the pioneers in this field, especially R. Vanderbei and J. Kasdin. This work is supported by JAXA.
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