Nick Siegler for Brendan Crill 
ExEP Technology Update

Thought I was part of the early career folks.
Hi everyone.
I'm Nick Siegler.
I'm the chief technologist of our exoplanet program.
I'm giving this talk on behalf of my Deputy, Brendan Crill.
So Brendan and his family are doing great, but their house is within just a few blocks of the epicenter of the Eaton fire.
And so he's had to evacuate.
He's doing fine, but a little, a little shaken up. So I'll I'll, I'll try to step in for him.
OK.
Just a reminder of all the work we do in the exoplanet Program Technology Office, if you will.
Our job is to identify technologies that will either enable missions or or instruments for NASA.
So we work with the Community and make sure that we're working on the right technologies to make these missions happen.
So if we if we look at the the more recent times with Roman, thanks to to NASA's SAT program that strategic astrophysics technologies, we had the right technologies in in place.
And we were able to enable them to be infused into Roman and make Roman happen.
Fast forward 10 years later with Hab Worlds.
We have other technologies that were advancing with the Community and the SAT program is really driving a lot of that until the real money starts to appear for, for Hab worlds and we're already starting to think about technologies for after habitable worlds.
All right, I'll give you a quick highlight of 2024 because a lot happened.
Let's start off with the fact that we updated our own technology gap list.
This is the list that we do every two years.
So we work with our friends in the Fisk cause Core Department program offices.
And this basically tips to P is across the world.
What NASA's technology gaps that they're interested?
We're interested in in closing, right?
So it's used for for satp is apropos, and this report is now publicly available.
It was obviously informed by the 2020 decade Old Survey.
That's where we take a lot of our instructions from the community, was heavily involved and this year we involved the Hab World's project office since they're the next.
Election mission after at the Roman and they gave us a lot of important feedback.
There were several dozen gaps that that came our way at the end of the at the end of the day, we only added three more.
It's not surprising we only added three because we've been following exoplanet direct imaging for some time now.
So the ones that we did pick or we added, we split the chronograph contrast into three. We you can see that.
That habitable worlds are spending a lot of time and trying to figure out which chronograph capabilities he wants to advance.
How far into the new infrared?
How far into the UV?
And so we split them up by by wavelength, so you can find that report publicly available.
So here's one of the performance measures that we look at for Corona fee on the vertical axis, you see normalized intensity otherwise known as contrast. And on the horizontal axis is.
Angular separation so that that dashed line is 3 Lambda over D about 180 milli arc seconds.
And so we we look at this to see how we're performing the dash lines or chronograph demonstrations with stimulated segmented pupils because habra's is going to be segmented and you can see we haven't done a lot of these.
So this is certainly an opportunity where we need to improve on.
Tip of the hat to to Remiere from the institute. He has one of the more sophisticated demonstrations. You can see his curve up there on top.
His is done in air and his results finally came out at 10%.
So you can see we have a a long way to go, but his is an air and we typically do these tests in vacuums, in vacuum.
So we're very excited.
See how they advance over time and the good news is they actually have an sat that was recently approved to take their technology and put into a vacuum chamber.
So we're looking forward to that.
The bow lines are demos that are more compatible with monolithic pupils and clear apertures. What we used to think was going to be the the trajectory, and so John Schroder just finished an SAT and you can see he has amongst some of the best results so.
And then at the bottom we have the subscale starshade demo.
So the take away here is we really need to drive all of the.
Performance is down. If we're gonna make a success and perhaps greater focus on segmented apertures, that's that's where the the need is.
We've been exploring other areas where we need to improve our performance. DM Electronics, thanks to our friend.
In the back there.
Has already been solved.
We we believe, and we're gonna be looking at the chronograph masks.
Masks are actually the the limiting step at this point in time.
It's not necessarily other things.
It's it's we're not able to get the quality of the masks that we're looking for.
But we could also do better on test bed modeling to find out other areas that we can improve on.
And there's always unknown unknowns, so it would have been it that's that's, that's the name I was looking for, for the DMS, OK, a couple years ago.
You may remember we we announced that we were going to Commission 3 Rd. mapping activities to help half worlds because half worlds was still in the process of organizing themselves.
And I want to just let you know that we we actually did it.
We we worked with the community and worked with.
Over 100 different engineers and scientists who volunteered, and I think Hab world is in a better state now than they would have been if we didn't do this.
So hats off to the chronograph design survey led by Bertrand No, Russ Bellikoff and Chris Stark.
They identified 19 chronograph designs.
That's a lot.
We won't need that many, but it'll give habworlds an opportunity to do a down select at a future date when they're ready.
We also did the DM technology road map with Eduardo and Tyler Groff.
And Duncan Liu.
They identified 3DM vendors that we think have.
They pose a good chance of being able to meet the Hab world's requirements, and they're they're already being funded because of the recommendations of that group.
And then lastly, Laurent Puo and Pinchin led the chronograph technology road map working group.
And then that was a huge effort. And they've also completed their work. So you can find the final reports in the public domain at that link there. And they each gave public presentations. And so they're all done with their work and now habitable worlds. It has taken over.
And they're certainly benefiting from these inputs.
All right, sarshe.
So the sarshay you heard technology development has officially ceased.
We have completed basically all of our work.
In 2018 is when we actually started this direct activity and we had declared through a technology development plan 15 milestones that we thought we needed to hit. And I'm proud to say that we we finished all 15. The 15th is being reviewed.
So I won't count it completely.
Done so, this is our score card for for star shade it. This will be the last time I show this, but on the on the left you see the three gaps. We have a contrast gap.
Does the star shade actually work?
Does it actually meet his performance?
For contrast, Starlight suppression does it.
Can we advance the technologies to enable the STARSH to fly information and then lastly, can we deploy this huge structure and keep it stable so those are the three gaps in in in gold you can see right next to it are the five technologies that have been ADV.
Over the last.
Seven years and all those circles with arrows in it are the milestones that correspond to those technologies.
So I'm proud to announce that all three gaps are officially closed, and so I would say the words I would say is that those technologies that have closed those gaps are all at TRL 5.
For a telescope of two to four meters, that's probably the right way of saying it.
Hab Worlds is likely to be a 6M class telescope, so we haven't done a formal assessment of how the stars shade.
Can meet Habra requirements and so sometime in this spring we're going to have a formal close out briefing to conclude Starshade.
But we're going to invite a bunch of really talented flight engineers to take a look at what we've done and make their own assessment of how close we are to.
A Hab world's application.
Right. So moving again, HAB rules is is the is the mission we've always dreamt of for direct imaging of exoplanets and being able to do spectroscopy.
So here's the hcit facility that I manage at at JPL.
So this vacuum chamber that we've just recently returned back from, we've returned.
We've gotten back from Roman is now going out to.
To to have worlds.
So obviously it's going to stay in our lab, but we've already decided that we're going to give this to the Haberos project so they can start thinking about what their TRL five test bed is going to look like.
And they're already starting to work on that.
We're collaborating with them so they understand everything we've learned and they can take it to the next step. That larger vacuum chairman, the back, the HC. IT2 has the world's most, I guess, high performing chronograph tests, test beds one and two both fit in.
There and that's what's going to be advancing SA TS for the next several years until we're done with the SAT program for chronographs and then Hab Worlds really can take it to the next level.
I'm personally committed to finishing these SA TS as quickly as possible to give Hab worlds additional capacity so they can use these.
These test beds as they see fit.
But the SAT program continues to be the engine that's advancing technology.
So I'll share with you the ones that were just recently awarded and just because it's competed doesn't mean it's not targeted.
I would say that the SAT program is doing a very good job in funding those technologies. We need the most.
So for choreography, you see there's a vortex, one that is highly recommended.
We've never done UV technology development.
We never thought anyone was was going to try to do something that difficult, so.
There's funding for that, and then the one at Space Telescope is going to go into our vacuum chamber.
So we're excited to see them deformable mirrors got some funding.
Meant to Tel scope, this is.
Technology regarding thermal sensing and thermal control, an important part to wavefront error aberration.
So Arizona got some funding for that.
Here's the one sat that has nothing to do with habitable worlds.
This is for a future, perhaps mid infrared mission that we're all excited about.
And so there is that.
But most of these do support Hab worlds, and there's a single photon counting that is managed by our friends at Fiskar Fiskars core and also some.
Coatings for aluminum mirrors.
So we're doing that really good job.
Before we start directing these missions to to make sure that they're listening to our gap list and and the right ones apparently are being funded.
This is my last slide.
Looking ahead, how can you be involved?
You might have heard Mark Clampman speak about something.
He's very excited about the emerging technologies for astrophysics.
There are technologies out there like aiml not for data analysis but more for for helping us generate.
New designs, new materials that we want to look at advanced materials like composites, nano, fabricated materials, Astro photonics, quantum sensors for sensing single photon detectors. These are technologies that we know something about, but we haven't really taken a hard look at how they could help astrophysics in partic.
So so Mark has asked myself and Mario Perez to Co chair a workshop at Ames in March.
It's going to be invite only to get us started with experts from across the country, but we're committed.
That once we understand what the recommendations are, we're gonna open this up to the public so everyone can be involved in basically understanding. How can these advanced technologies help either enable new instruments and perhaps maybe help us with our current missions?
You can also continue to read the gap lists and keep proposing for SATS, Aparas and the Nancy Grace Roman Technology fellowships, typically for early career folks, has been a real success.
And and there's just funding available for more of those.
Remember, proposals are all due by the end of this month and just a public service announcement. If anybody wants to use the high contrast imaging test bed for advanced coronography, please reach out to my deputy, Brendan Crill.
You need to get a letter of commitment from us to make sure we understand what you want to do. And then lastly HWO is is, is is the main fish after Roman and so they put together a high level technology road map.
It's actually very good.
So if you're interested in how you can get involved, or maybe offering some technologies, please.
Look at their website and you can see where they're heading and that's it.
Thank you.
Questions for Nick?
I see Eric is come.
No, he's not coming. So OK.
Yeah, please. Go ahead.
I was curious just generally in the kind of technology development program are there if any opportunities to leverage developments from other government agencies like on the national security side?
Yes, that's that's that's a great question. In fact, Mark was just saying, how come NASA always has to fund these new technologies and why don't we leverage work that's being done.
So there's an active communication between.
Agencies, especially in the classified world but but Mark really wanted to broaden it out through this emerging technologies workshop.
Specifically said, I want to see people from other government agencies to be involved because they might.
They might actually have solutions for problems that only we know about, and they just never thought about it.
So yes, we are.
Thank you for the question.
Any other questions? Let's see.
I find your slide on the suppression lab demos very interesting. It seems like especially for the segmented mirrors, right?
You need to go down by two orders of magnitude to reach HWO.
So what are the?
Things that you see most promising to get down to that level.
Yeah. I mean, I think that speaks largely to the fact that we that the PIs who have been proposing in the past, we're focusing more on on monolithic mirrors, right.
And so there's a lot of catching up to do.
In in in in that area. So if you're asking about some of the.
The low hanging fruit that we have to address from a technology perspective.
The the the position of the segments is is.
It's critical because they add their own way for an error, so there's any positioning errors and how they're aligned, but that that's a new feature that we haven't worried about in the past, but some of the investments that NASA has made with industry partners are focusing exactly on.
That is, how do we keep the paraboloid always a paraboloid? And that's something we've not done before at at at NASA.
Thank you very much, Nick.