The architectural principle of the SPEED bench is presented in the above diagram. The field of view of interest is restricted to 8 λ/D in radius given the aimed objective of high contrast at small angular separations. The bench is therefore composed of a visible cophasing optical path (in blue) and a near-infrared path (in red) dedicated to high contrast.
The common path is in orange colour in the 3D CAO view of the bench presented above. The visible path dedicated to the optical cophasing corresponds to the blue lines and the near-infrared path, dedicated to high-contrast imaging, corresponds to the red lines.
The Speed bench is installed in a clean-room environment (ISO7 classroom) at the Lagrange Laboratory, FIZEAU building on the Valrose campus in the city centre of Nice.
