📋 Tender Overview
Exoplanetary Systems With A Coronagraphic Archive Processing Engine
Funded Under
European Research Council (Erc)
Total Cost
€ 1 999 996,00
Eu Contribution
€ 1 999 996,00
Coordinated By
Universite D~Aix Marseille
France
Objective
Determining the frequency of life in the Universe is one of the main challenges of the next decades. It requires a large high-contrast imager in space such as LUVOIR or HabEx, able to characterize dozens of nearby earth-like planets. The detection of such planets, 10^-10 fainter than their star and lost in the bright and varying glare of the star in the images, is a formidable challenge. In the race to remove the contaminating starlight, both the coronagraphic instrument and the image processing have a key role to play. Yet, the science and technological definition of these mission concepts relies entirely on the coronagraphic instrument to reject the starlight, assuming a simple gain of 10 in sensitivity with image processing based on 15-year-old techniques developed for HST. The cost of this approach is a daunting wavefront stability requirement of 20pm rms and conservative exoplanet yield estimates.
