Abstract

Direct imaging of exoplanets and circumstellar disks requires starlight suppression to create regions of high-contrast in the telescope’s focal plane. The technological challenge increases in particular with working regions close to the stellar PSF and for wider spectral bands. The EXoplanetary Circumstellar Environments and Disk Explorer (EXCEDE) science mission concept uses a visible-wavelength Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization (PIAA) coronagraph to enable high-contrast imaging of circumstellar debris systems and some giant planets at angular separations reaching into the habitable zones of some of the nearest stars. A laboratory demonstration of its starlight suppression system was carried out in the vacuum chamber at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center using 10% broadband light demonstrating high contrast simultaneously in two working regions of 1.2-2.0 Lambda/D and 2.0-11.0 Lambda/D for a single-sided dark hole using a deformable mirror (DM) upstream of the PIAA coronagraph. We discuss experimental results obtained from the testbed and comparisons to model simulations demonstrating contrast sensitivity.