Showing astro-ph.IMShow all

446 papers · 1 filter

astro-ph.IM2026

The Pandora SmallSat: post-launch operations and mission update

Trevor O. Foote, Elisa V. Quintana, Jessie L. Dotson +41

The Pandora SmallSat is a NASA flight project designed to study the atmospheres of exoplanets. Transmission spectroscopy of transiting exoplanets provides our best opportunity to i…

astro-ph.IM2026

The Pandora SmallSat: Target Selection and Early Science

Emily A. Gilbert, Elisa V. Quintana, Jessie L. Dotson +41

The Pandora spacecraft is a smallsat selected in NASA's inaugural class of Pioneers missions. The aim of the Pandora mission is to disentangle stellar activity signals from exoplan…

astro-ph.IM2026

Prototyping the Next-Generation Spectrograph for Space Exploration: Digital Micromirror Device-based Multi-Object Spectrograph (DMD-MOS) Calibration and Performance Assessment

Jiayi Emma Xu, Sarik Jeram, Shaojie Chen +7

Abandoning the traditional approaches to multi-object spectrographs, the Digital Micro-mirror Device-based Multi-Object Spectrograph (DMD-MOS) leverages a robust, elegant method fo…

astro-ph.IM2026

First laboratory demonstration of iEFC for high-contrast imaging at small angular separation on ELT scales

Charles Sallard, Patrice Martinez, Alain Spang +7

Implicit electric field conjugation (iEFC) is an efficient, model-free wavefront control technique for dark hole creation. Its model-free nature, relying on calibration with real d…

astro-ph.IM2026

Pushing high angular resolution and high contrast observations on the VLTI from Y to L band with the Asgard instrumental suite: integration status and plans

Marc-Antoine Martinod, Michael J. Ireland, Denis Defrère +39

ESO's VLTI has a history of record-breaking discoveries in astrophysics using high-angular resolution instrumentation. Its latest visitor instrument, the Asgard instrumental suite,…

astro-ph.IM2026

Status and performance of the Asgard/NOTT cold nulling camera

P. Chingaipe, G. Medgyesi, A. Mazzoli +25

Long-baseline nulling interferometry suppresses the on-axis light of a star, enabling high-contrast observations of faint circumstellar emission and exoplanets at high angular reso…

astro-ph.IM2026

AO3k + SCExAO: on-sky wavefront quality and demonstration of novel WFS techniques with the double XAO system

Julien Lozi, Kyohoon Ahn, Vincent Deo +5

The Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) system, fed by its upstream 3000-actuator "woofer" (AO3k), serves both as a platform for high contrast imaging (HCI) techn…

astro-ph.IM2026

Forward modelling coronagraphic images with a fully physical, differentiable digital twin of MagAO-X: first laboratory results

Matthijs Mars, Sebastiaan Y. Haffert, Louis Desdoigts +10

Post-processing of high contrast imaging data relies on an accurate model of the stellar point spread function (PSF). Current techniques build this model from the science images th…

astro-ph.IM2026

Digging dark holes on-sky with the Self-Coherent Camera: Preliminary results

Elena Tonucci, Sebastiaan Y. Haffert, Jared R. Males +17

Current high-contrast imaging instruments are limited by wavefront errors originating from non-common path aberrations (NCPAs) due, for example, to manufacturing errors in the opti…

astro-ph.IM2026

Sub-diffraction-limited coronagraphic imaging with nano-printed PIAACMC phase masks

Elena Tonucci, Sebastiaan Y. Haffert, Warren B. Foster +22

Imaging Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of their host star is among the main science objectives of future ground-based and space-based observatories. However, the extre…

astro-ph.IM2026

The final design of GMagAO-X: the wavefront sensing and control (WFS&C) architecture of GMagAO-X

Sebastiaan Y. Haffert, Jared R. Males, Laird M. Close +10

The Giant Magellan Adaptive Optics eXtreme (GMagAO-X) instrument has now been selected as an official part of the Giant Magellan Telescope's (GMT) instrument suite. The instrument…

astro-ph.IM2026

Quantum-optimal instruments for high-contrast imaging with multi-plane light converters

Sebastiaan Y. Haffert, Yinzi Xin, Rico Landman

Spatial Mode Demultiplexers (SPADE) are devices that split an incoming wavefront into a particular set of electric field modes. SPADEs have been shown to be quantum-optimal for man…

astro-ph.IM2026

Demonstration of simultaneous PIAA- coronagraphy and wavefront sensing using a single metasurface-based focal-plane optic

Dhwanil Patel, Sebastiaan Y. Haffert, Skyler Palatnick +23

Controlling residual wavefront aberrations downstream of an extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) system is a major challenge in high-contrast imaging. These aberrations produce quasi-sta…

astro-ph.IM2026

Instrumental artifacts in photonic lantern spectroastrometry and their mitigation with PLred

Yoo Jung Kim, Michael P. Fitzgerald, Malena Bloom +10

Spectroastrometry is a powerful spectral-differential technique for probing angular scales below the resolution limit, but it is also well known to be susceptible to instrumental a…

astro-ph.IM2026

Early Exploration of the Scientific Discovery Space for the Habitable Worlds Observatory

Courtney D. Dressing, Danica Adams, Evelyne Alecian +324

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is a future NASA flagship mission concept identified by the Astro2020 Decadal Survey as the highest priority for large space missions. HWO sh…

astro-ph.IM2026

AMReX-Astrophysics Microphysics: A set of microphysics routines for astrophysical simulation codes based on the AMReX library

Astro Microphysics Team, Khanak Bhargava, Abigail Bishop +15

The AMReX-Astrophysics Microphysics library provides a common set of microphysics routines (reaction networks and associated physics, equations of state, and various transport coef…

astro-ph.IM2026

Multi-sensor fusion for fine-guidance and milliarcsecond-level attitude estimation of balloon-borne telescope

Philippe Voyer, Maya Amit, Steven J. Benton +44

Balloon-borne telescopes rely on fine-guidance systems to achieve milliarcsecond image stability despite residual disturbances from the balloon environment. In these systems, the F…

astro-ph.IM2026

Shaping the future of Global Interferometric Arrays: Imaging Strong Gravity and Magnetic Fields

Venkatessh Ramakrishnan, Violette Impellizzeri, Chi-Kwan Chan +7

The observational validation of General Relativity (GR) has been propelled in recent years by recent breakthroughs in Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) augmented by ALMA. We…

astro-ph.IM2026

Charge diffusion and modulation transfer function in a Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope detector

Emily Macbeth, Katherine Laliotis, Christopher M. Hirata +1

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) is an observatory motivated by the search to understand dark energy, exoplanets, and general astrophysics. Roman will bring unpreceden…

astro-ph.IM2026★ 1 cited

Characterizing Earth analogs may require a moderate or high-resolution spectrograph

Jean-Baptiste Ruffio, Sarah Steiger, Corey Spohn +16

A primary goal of the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is to detect and measure the abundance of biosignature molecules, such as water (H2O) and oxygen (O2), in the atmosphere of…

astro-ph.IM2026★ 14 cited

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Data Preview 1

Vera C Rubin Observatory Team, Tatiana Acero Cuellar, Emily Acosta +325

We present Rubin Data Preview 1 DP1, the first data from the NSF DOE Vera C Rubin Observatory, comprising raw and calibrated single epoch images, coadds, difference images, detecti…

astro-ph.IM2026

Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization Complex Mask Coronagraph (PIAACMC) on-sky demonstration with MagAO-X

Elena Tonucci, Sebastiaan Haffert, Warren Foster +18

Advancing the technological development of small inner working angle (IWA) coronagraphs is essential to enabling high-contrast imaging of temperate exoplanets with future extremely…

astro-ph.IM2025★ 33 cited

The SPHEREx Satellite Mission

James J. Bock, Asad M. Aboobaker, Joseph Adamo +111

SPHEREx, a NASA explorer satellite launched on 11 March 2025, is carrying out the first all-sky near-infrared spectral survey. The satellite observes in 102 spectral bands from 0.7…

astro-ph.IM2025★ 1 cited

The miniJPAS and J-NEP surveys: Machine learning for star-galaxy separation

Ana Paula Jeakel, Gabriel Vieira dos Santos, Valerio Marra +27

We present a supervised machine learning classification of sources from the Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey (J-PAS) Pathfinder datasets: miniJP…