NEXT: The Netherlands EXoplanet Testbed I. Goals And opto-mechanical Design

[astro-ph.IM] We report on the goals, design, and ongoing development of the Netherlands EXoplanet Testbed (NEXT), a high-contrast imaging testbed under construction in Leiden.

NEXT is designed to develop and validate technologies and algorithms for extreme adaptive optics (XAO) and coronagraphy at the performance levels required by the next generation of high-contrast imagers on the Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) and future space observatories.

All powered optics in the common path are custom off-axis parabolas, making the bench fully reflective up to the science cameras, and it operates from the visible to the near-infrared (500-1800 nm).

It combines a woofer-tweeter XAO module, using an ALPAO woofer and a Boston Micromachines kilo-DM as tweeter, with a coronagraphic arm that supports common coronagraph architectures and focal-plane wavefront control for dark-hole digging, and reserves space for a suite of wavefront sensors.

The design targets a raw contrast of 10−7 (goal: 10−8) at 5λ/D and 800 nm. We present the opto-mechanical design of the testbed, the key trade-offs made to reach these contrast levels, and Fresnel-propagation simulations of its predicted performance.

Rico Landman, Sebastiaan Haffert, Louis Desdoigts, Matthijs Mars, Dhwanil Patel, Daniel Smith, Remko Stuik, Adam Taras, Elena Tonucci, Yinzi Xin

Comments: 14 pages, 7 figures, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2026
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.24442 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2608.24442v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.24442
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Submission history
From: Rico Landman
[v1] Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:57:11 UTC (3,583 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24442

Astrobiology