The High Contrast Imaging Testbed results demonstrates contrast at levels required to detect earth-twin.

High Contrast Imaging Testbed layout.

Three simulated planets —one as bright as Jupiter, one half as bright as Jupiter and one as faint as Earth—stand out plainly in this image created from a sequence of 480 images captured by the High Contrast Imaging Testbed at JPL. A roll-subtraction technique, borrowed from space astronomy, was used to distinguish planets from background light. The asterisk marks the location of the system's simulated star.

Optical modeling and analysis is the indispensable adjunct of optical design. It's how we know a design does what it was intended to do, or in the alternative, how we ascertain a design's inherent sensitivities and limitations. The tools used in this work are many and varied, ranging from industry standard ray trace products like CODE V and ZEMAX, to Matlab-based codes like MACOS that can be interfaced with other Matlab codes in integrated modeling efforts, to one-off diffraction codes capable of tracking wavefront and pathlength variations at picometer levels.

And just as advanced interferometric, high contrast imaging and active/adaptive optical systems invariably employ multiple optical design capabilities, so also do they make use of multiple optical modeling and analysis techniques. Once again, SIM provides a case in point, having used traditional tools in the design of its compressor optics, one-off diffraction codes in the analysis of its picometer metrology systems and analogous purpose-built codes in the polarization-, wavelength- and diffraction-sensitive analysis of its beam combiner and some of its testbeds.