  A high contrast coronagraph is expected to provide one of the promising ways
to directly observe extra-solar planets. We present the newest results of our
laboratory experiment investigating "rigid" coronagraph with a binary shaped
checkerboard pupil mask, which should offer a highly stable solution for
telescopes without adaptive optics (AO) for wavefront correction in space
missions. The primary aim of this work was to study the stability of the
coronagraph, and to demonstrate its performance without adaptive wavefront
correction. Estimation of both the raw contrast and the gain of the point
spread function (PSF) subtraction were needed. The limiting factor of the
contrast was also important. A binary shaped pupil mask of a checkerboard type
has been designed. The mask, consisting of an aluminum film on a glass
substrate, was manufactured using nano-fabrication techniques with electron
beam lithography. Careful evaluation of coronagraphic performance, including
PSF subtraction, was carried out in air using the developed mask. A contrast of
$6.7 \times 10^{-8}$ was achieved for the raw coronagraphic image by areal
averaging of all of the observed dark regions. Following PSF subtraction, the
contrast reached $6.8 \times 10^{-9}$. Speckles were a major limiting factor
throughout the dark regions of both the raw image and the PSF subtracted image.
A rigid coronagraph with PSF subtraction without AO is a useful method to
achieve high contrast observations. Applications of a rigid coronagraph to a
Space Infrared telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics (SPICA) and other
platforms are discussed.
