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W. A. Traub, M. J. Kuchner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
We calculate the observing time needed to detect an exo-planet around a nearby star for a suite of coronagraphs and interferometers which have been proposed for the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission. We use a general (u,v) plane approach to represent the interferometer and coronagraph configurations. For our exozodiacal dust model, we use ZODIPIC, an IDL package available online at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~mkuchner/. The TPF architecture models are represented by their physical and optical parameters, and are assumed to operate in an ideal fashion, with the exception that instrumental wavefront perturbations are included in the model. The time required to detect a planet is calculated by assuming that the noise is due to photon count fluctuations in the background flux, where the background is the sum of diffracted stellar leak, scattered stellar leak, local zodi, exozodi, planet, and instrumental emission.
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