Balloon flight demonstration of coronagraph focal plane wavefront correction with PICTURE-C

Abstract. The Planetary Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment - Coronagraph (PICTURE-C) mission is designed to directly image debris disks and exozodiacal dust around nearby stars from a high-altitude balloon using a 60 cm diameter off-axis telescope and a vector vortex coronagraph. During its second flight from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on September 28, 2022, PICTURE-C successfully used its high and low-order wavefront control systems to perform focal plane wavefront correction for the first time on an observatory in a near-space environment. The coronagraph achieved a modest broadband (20%) contrast of 5  ×  10  −  6, with performance limited by dynamic pointing transients. The low-order wavefront control system achieved optical pointing stabilization of 1 milliarcseconds (mas) root mean squared (RMS) over 30 second timescales.