Space telescope design to directly image the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri
Eduardo Bendek, Ruslan Belikov, Julien Lozi, Sandrine Thomas, Jared, Males, Sasha Weston, Michael McElwain

TL;DR
This paper proposes a specialized small space telescope design with advanced coronagraphy and post-processing techniques to directly image Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri, achieving high contrast and detection confidence.
Contribution
It introduces an innovative Silicon Carbide off-axis telescope with integrated coronagraph and multi-star wavefront control, optimized for high-contrast imaging of nearby star systems.
Findings
Achieves contrast ratios of 1e-10 necessary for Earth-like planet imaging.
Utilizes a stable Earth-trailing orbit for effective post-processing.
Enables 90% detection completeness of habitable zone planets.
Abstract
The scientific interest in directly image and identifying Earth-like planets within the Habitable Zone (HZ) around nearby stars is driving the design of specialized direct imaging mission such as ACESAT, EXO-C, EXO-S and AFTA-C. The inner edge of Alpha Cen A and B Habitable Zone is found at exceptionally large angular separations of 0.7 and 0.4 arcseconds respectively. This enables direct imaging of the system with a 0.3m class telescope. Contrast ratios in the order of 1e-10 are needed to image Earth-brightness planets. Low-resolution (5-band) spectra of all planets, will allow establishing the presence and amount of an atmosphere. This star system configuration is optimal for a specialized small, and stable space telescope, that can achieve high-contrast but has limited resolution. This paper describes an innovative instrument design and a mission concept based on a full Silicon…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
