First light of the High Contrast Integral Field Spectrograph (HCIFS)

editorial reviewed
Future space-based observatories such as WFIRST will be equipped with high contrast imaging instruments designed to study extrasolar planets and disks in the absence of atmospheric perturbations. One of the most efficient techniques to achieve this goal is the combination of wavefront control and broadband coronagraphy. Being able to achieve a high contrast over a wide spectral bandwidth allows us to characterize the chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres using an integral field spectrograph (IFS). In this paper, we report on the development of such an IFS for the High Contrast Imaging Lab (HCIL) at Princeton University, downstream of a Shaped Pupil coronagraph. Our final lensletbased design calls for the light in an 18% band around 660 nm to be dispersed with a spectral resolution of 50. We also present our new laboratory control software written in Python, allowing the import of open-source packages such as CRISPY to ultimately reconstruct 3D datacubes from IFS spatio-spectral science images. Finally, we show and discuss our preliminary first light results, reaching a contrast of ~10-5 using in-house focal-plane wavefront control and estimation algorithms with two deformable mirrors.