The direct detection of young and warm extrasolar giant planets in the habitable zone of nearby cool stars is one of the major goals of future ground-based high-contrast imaging (HCI) instruments. The motive is to study the physical and chemical properties of exoplanetary atmospheres and search for evidences of biosignatures. Direct imaging is the required technique to characterize exoplanets with spectroscopy of their atmospheres. However, the ability to resolve planet signal above bright stellar halo is still a challenge. A coronagraph is an optic, which suppresses the diffraction effects of the telescope by blocking the starlight but wavefront errors arising due to Earth’s atmospheric turbulence scatter starlight over the science region of interest and bury faint planet photons in stellar/speckle noise. Most of these errors are mitigated by the dedicated Extreme Adaptive Optics instruments. However, under the AO/ExAO WF residuals, imaging and characterizing exoplanets at small angles require achieving detection limit 10 to 100 times better than the state of the art. No existing ground-based HCI instruments have successfully disentangled the planet signals from stellar residuals at small angles. The proposal seek to develop and demonstrate wavefront sensing and control techniques that will enhance the planet detection sensitivity at small angles and will aid the existing HCI instruments in directly imaging young Jovian-like exoplanets at small angles around nearby stars. This research proposal will also enable next generation of exoplanets characterization instruments with the European Extremely Large Telescope to perform low resolution spectroscopy of Neptune or Super-Earth exoplanets in the HZ of low mass stars (for example M-type).

The modern world is subject to many natural, man-made and social dangers. Many of them are global in nature, as they threaten the very existence of human civilization. Notable among them is the danger of Earth collision with space bodies of cometary and asteroid nature. At present, there is no doubt about the importance and urgency of this problem. In particular, this is evidenced by a report of the National Science and Technology Council, USA, where the importance to detect and characterize the Near-Earth Objects (NOE) population and to prevent and respond to NEO impacts on Earth is outlined. To protect our planet from the dangers of collision with small bodies, it is first of all necessary to understand from which specific of almost 1 million bodies the Earth needs to be protected. The project aims to make a system to search for possible threats to the Earth from space bodies which will be independent from the ones that are now being operated in NASA and ESA. My project NEOForCE has several objectives: 1) develop new methods for estimating of the impact probability of a small body with the Earth 2) develop methods for obtaining more reliable estimates of orbital parameters and their uncertainties 3) make a search for old observations of known objects. Several web-services at the Institut de Mécanique Céleste et de Calcul des Ephémérides, Paris observatory will be launched that will include: 1) list of potentially colliding with the Earth asteroids and comets with their impact probability values 2) list of possible close encounters of asteroids and comets with the Earth 3) list of old observations made on photographic plates many years ago (even centuries) with the identifications to the objects imaged on them.