Integrated Focal Plane Wavefront Estimating for Space Mission Coronagraphs

Almost all proposed space coronagraph instruments for directly imaging exoplanets need wavefront estimation and control. Our project provided a new way of doing wavefront estimation. Similar to existing methods, our method uses a Deformable Mirror (DM) to provide sufficient and controlled diversity to enable reliable coronagraph phase retrieval. However, our key innovation is taht we do it without relying on the model of the DM. Our recovers both phase and amplitude of the pupil/Lyot plane by using a sequence of randomly aberrated partially-correlated focal plane images. In our case random optical aberrations are produced artificially by the DM and caused naturally by long term optical instability of the system.