Stray light control in space instruments: overcoming the conventional limits

Stray light is a critical problem for space telescopes. It these aspects could be solved, we could develop space instruments with far better performances. This would open the door to new applications and scientific discoveries, from monitoring Earth atmosphere composition better than ever to observing fainter objects in the galaxy. This work aspired to solve this problem. It started by the application of state of the art methods of control by design, then new approaches were proposed to overcome the conventional limits. One of them consists in removing complex stray light features by post-processing, where an improvement by two orders of magnitude is demonstrated. Next, a major limitation of traditional approaches is the inability to measure and identify individual stray light contributors in an instrument. Ultrafast time-of-flight characterization is introduced to solve this decades-old problem, enabling unprecedented understanding and control of stray light in space telescopes.