Coronagraph

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Holiday Special: Eight Nights of Exoplanet Light

5 min read

For the holidays, we’re bringing you eight examples of directly-imaged light from planets beyond our solar system.

Article7 years ago
An optical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Camilo Mejia Prada, shines a light on the interior of a testbed for an instrument called a coronagraph that will fly aboard the WFIRST space telescope. Engineers at JPL are testing mirrors (the small, mounted disks in a line at right) and deformable mirrors (the large, pen-marked disks are stand-ins) that will be part of the coronagraph. This instrument, contained inside the telescope, blocks the glare of stars so that planets around them can be directly imaged. Photo credit: Matthew Luem.

Hiding in the sunshine: The search for other Earths

6 min read

How instruments called coronagraphs might help us ultimately find Earth-like worlds.

Article9 years ago
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