An Updated Preliminary Optical Design and Performance analysis of the Planetary Systems Imager Adaptive Optics System

Abstract

The Planetary Systems Imager (PSI), a proposed instrument suite for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), enables a broad range of extreme-AO, high-contrast observations. PSI is specifically optimized for high contrast exoplanet science from 0.5 to 13 µm and to that end includes a core near-IR AO system that feeds multiple AO+science instrument subsystems. In this paper, we present a preliminary optical design for the full PSI-AO system, feeding the PSI-Red (2-5 µm), PSI-Blue (0.5-1.8 µm), and PSI-10 (8-13 µm) subsystems. We discuss an initial concept of testing and operations for the system that feeds into the conceptual design. We build on our preliminary end-to-end PSI-Red AO simulation to estimate the raw planet-to-star contrast ratios associated with PSI-Red and extrapolate these results to represent the effects of a PSI-Blue deformable mirror. © 2022 SPIE.