An experimental testbed for NEAT to demonstrate micro-pixel accuracy
A. Crouzier, F. Malbet, O. Preis, F. Henault, P. Kern, G. Martin, P., Feautrier, c. Cara, P. Lagage, A. Leger, J. M. LeDuigou, M. Shao, R., Goullioud

TL;DR
This paper presents the design and current status of a vacuum testbed for NEAT, aiming to demonstrate micro-pixel centroid measurement precision critical for detecting Earth-like exoplanets.
Contribution
It details the design considerations, trade-offs, and current progress of a testbed to achieve 5e-6 pixel centroid precision for NEAT's astrometric measurements.
Findings
Design trade-offs for high-precision centroid measurement
Current testbed achieves near targeted precision
Framework for calibration of pixel efficiency variations
Abstract
NEAT is an astrometric mission proposed to ESA with the objectives of detecting Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of nearby solar-type stars. In NEAT, one fundamental aspect is the capability to measure stellar centroids at the precision of 5e-6 pixel. Current state-of-the-art methods for centroid estimation have reached a precision of about 4e-5 pixel at Nyquist sampling. Simulations showed that a precision of 2 micro-pixels can be reached, if intra and inter pixel quantum efficiency variations are calibrated and corrected for by a metrology system. The European part of the NEAT consortium is designing and building a testbed in vacuum in order to achieve 5e-6 pixel precision for the centroid estimation. The goal is to provide a proof of concept for the precision requirement of the NEAT spacecraft. In this paper we give the basic relations and trade-offs that come into play…
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