Supriya Chakrabarti

High-latitude ion transport and energetic explorer (HI-LITE): a mission to investigate ion outflow from the high-latitude ionosphere

The proposed HI-LITE Explorer will investigate the global ion outflow from the high-latitude ionosphere, its relationship to auroral features, and the consequences of this outflow on magnetospheric processes. The unique nature of the HI-LITE Explorer images will allow temporal and spatial features of the global ion outflow to be determined. The missions scientific motivation comes from the fundamental role high-latitude ionospheric ions play in the dynamics of the solar wind driven magnetospheric-ionospheric system. These outflows are a major source of plasma for the magnetosphere and it is believed they play an important role in the triggering of substorms. In addition this paper describes the HI-LITE spacecraft and instruments.

Optical tolerances for the PICTURE-C mission: error budget for electric field conjugation, beam walk, surface scatter, and polarization aberration

The Planetary Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment - Coronagraph (PICTURE-C) mission will directly image debris disks and exozodiacal dust around nearby stars from a high-altitude balloon using a vector vortex coronagraph. Four leakage sources owing to the optical fabrication tolerances and optical coatings are: electric field conjugation (EFC) residuals, beam walk on the secondary and tertiary mirrors, optical surface scattering, and polarization aberration. Simulations and analysis of these four leakage sources for the PICTUREC optical design are presented here.

The low-order wavefront control system for the PICTURE-C mission: high-speed image acquisition and processing

The Planetary Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment - Coronagraph (PICTURE-C) mission will directly image debris disks and exozodiacal dust around nearby stars from a high-altitude balloon using a vector vortex coronagraph. The PICTURE-C low-order wavefront control (LOWC) system will be used to correct time-varying low-order aberrations due to pointing jitter, gravity sag, thermal deformation, and the gondola pendulum motion. We present the hardware and software implementation of the low-order ShackHartmann and reflective Lyot stop sensors. Development of the high-speed image acquisition and processing system is discussed with the emphasis on the reduction of hardware and computational latencies through the use of a real-time operating system and optimized data handling. By characterizing all of the LOWC latencies, we describe techniques to achieve a framerate of 200 Hz with a mean latency of ∼378 μs