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

Date Published: 1 September 2017
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 10400, Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets VIII, 1040020 (1 September 2017); doi: 10.1117/12.2274125

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10400:
Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets VIII
Stuart Shaklan, Editor(s)