Thermal effects on solar images recorded in space

The Earth’s atmosphere introduces a spatial frequency filtering in the object images recorded with ground-based instruments. A solution is to observe with telescopes onboard satellites to avoid atmospheric effects and to obtain diffraction limited images. However, similar atmosphere problems encountered with ground-based instruments may subsist in space when we observe the Sun since thermal gradients at the front of the instrument affect the observations. We present in this paper some simulations showing how solar images recorded in a telescope focal plane are directly impacted by thermal gradients in its pupil plane. We then compare the results with real solar images recorded with the PICARD mission in space.