DAVINCI, a diluter aperture visible nulling coronagraphic instrument

Abstract

DAVINCI is a dilute aperture nulling coronagraph that has the potential of directly detecting an Earth in the habitable zone around ~100 nearby stars. The novel feature of this mission concept is to replace a filled aperture 5-6 meter telescope with 4 by 1.1 meter telescopes in a phased array, dramatically reducing the cost by potentially by a factor of 5-10.