For two years at Boston University, I worked on the instrumentation team for the PICTURE sounding rocket mission. The mission's initial goal was to directly image an extra-solar planet by eliminating the light contamination from its host star. This challenging optical task was to be accomplished using a nulling interferometer, depicted below. While I was involved with PICTURE, I helped develop a closed-loop electronics system to steer light to the precise input of the interferometer as the rocket continually jittered in space. To obscure the star but not the planet, we needed to maintain angular precision of less than one hundredth of an arcsecond.
PICTURE was a testbed mission for NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder.