IRAN: laboratory test bench for hypertelescope pupil-plane recombination

In 2004, our group proposed IRAN, an alternative beam-combination technique to the so-called hypertelescope imaging method introduced by Labeyrie in the 1990s. We have recently set up a laboratory experiment aiming at validating our image densification approach instead of the pupil densification scheme of Labeyrie. In our experiment, seven sub-apertures illuminated by laser sources are recombined using the IRAN scheme. The validation of the IRAN recombination consists basically in retrieving the point-spread intensity distribution (PSID), demonstrating the conservation of the object-image convolution relation. We will introduce IRAN, compare it to the hyper-telescope, and present the experimental results that we obtained.