The petaling effect, induced by pupil fragmentation from the telescope spider, drastically affects the performance of high contrast instruments by inducing core splitting on the PSF. Differential piston/tip/tilt aberrations within each optically separated fragment of the pupil are poorly measured by commonly used Adaptive Optics (AO) systems. We here pursue a design of dedicated low-order wavefront sensor – or petalometers – to complement the main AO. Interferometric devices sense differential aberrations between fragments with optimal sensitivity; their weakness though is their limitation to wrapped phase measurements. We show that by combining multiple spectral channels, we increase the capture range for petaling aberrations beyond several microns, enough to disambiguate one-wave wrapping errors made by the main AO system. We propose here to implement a petalometer from the multi-wavelength imaging mode of the VAMPIRES visible-light instrument, deployed on SCExAO at the Subaru Telescope. The interferometric measurements obtained in four spectral channels through a 7 hole non-redundant mask allow us to efficiently reconstruct differential piston between pupil petals.
The Gemini Planet Imager 2.0 (GPI 2.0) is an upgrade to the original GPI, an instrument for directly imaging exoplanet systems, which is being moved to the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Major changes involve improved coronagraph designs and upgrading the adaptive optics (AO) system with a new pyramid wavefront sensor (PWFS). The addition of these new components require revised models for evaluating the performance and understanding the limitations of the system. This in turn helps us inform the broader GPI 2.0 science goals. We run end-to-end AO simulations, to assess the performance of GPI 2.0 AO under typical atmospheric conditions on Mauna Kea. We use these simulations to help us determine operating parameters such as the limiting stellar magnitude, maximum Strehl ratio, and the contrast achieved by the joint AO-coronagraph system before speckle-suppression. This information will be used to predict the science performance on a range of targets and design observing strategies.
The Subaru Pathfinder Instrument for Detecting Exoplanets and Recovering Spectra (SPIDERS) has been built from the ground-up to demonstrate the fast-atmospheric self-coherent camera technique on-sky for the first time. This technique uses a common-path interferometer to measure and suppress speckles in real-time to build a dark hole, and to enable hyperspectral coherent differential imaging post-processing. These promise more than a hundred times improvement in sensitivity to young giant planets and debris disks around bright stars compared with previous, speckle-limited instruments. We will present SPIDERS, its laboratory performance on post-AO residuals, and an update on SPIDERS’ commissioning at Subaru.
The imaging search for exoplanets is mainly limited by quasi-static speckle noise that have lifetimes between milliseconds and hours. Attempts to remove this noise using post-processing by building a point spread function (PSF) model from diversity in time, wavelength, and so-forth are limited to a small improvement due to the evolution of the noise along these same axes. The Calibration 2 (CAL2) system, being built by an international team, is a National Research Council of Canada (NRC) funded facility-class focal plane wavefront sensor for the Gemini Planet Imager 2 (GPI2) upgrade. The project consists of a complete rebuild of the GPI calibration (CAL) system. Based on the self-coherent camera concept and the FAST focal plane mask, a fraction of the near-infrared (NIR) science bandpass is extracted using a new dichroic wheel to perform focal plane wavefront sensing, with the goal to do science while also improving the contrast for the GPI2 IFS, up to a factor of 100x on bright stars. The project is at the final design review stage, and construction is expected to start summer/fall 2024, with assembly late fall 2024, and shipping to the Gemini North observatory middle of 2025.
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a high-contrast imaging instrument designed to directly detect and characterise young, Jupiter-mass exoplanets. After six years of operation at the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, the instrument is being upgraded and moved to the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii as GPI 2.0. Several improvements have been made to the adaptive optics (AO) system as part of this upgrade. This includes replacing the current Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor with a pyramid wavefront sensor (PWFS) and a custom EMCCD. These changes will increase GPI’s sky coverage by accessing fainter targets, improving corrections on fainter stars and allowing faster and ultra-low latency operations on brighter targets. The PWFS subsystem was independently built and tested to verify its performance before being integrated into the GPI 2.0 instrument. This paper will present the pre-integration performance test results, including pupil image quality, throughput and linearity without modulation.
Gemini Observatory operates twin 8m telescopes, one located in the Southern hemisphere, on Cerro Pachón in Chile, and one located in the Northern hemisphere, on Maunakea in Hawai’i. Currently, the Observatory operates 2 Adaptive Optics (AO) systems. Gemini South is equipped with the Gemini Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics System (GeMS), a wide field AO system, operating with 5 laser-guide stars and providing a uniform image quality (10% to 30% Strehl Ratio in the 1 to 2.5μm range) over an 85”x85” field-of-view. The ALTitude conjugate Adaptive optics for the InfraRed NGS/LGS Single-Conjugate Adaptive Optics system which operates in the 1 to 2.5μm range is located at Gemini North. A new AO workhorse facility is currently being developed for Gemini North, the Gemini North Adaptive Optics system (GNAO) which will feed the Gemini Infrared Multi-Object Spectrograph (GIRMOS). GNAO has a wide-field mode with improved image quality over a 2 arcminute field-of-view (FoV), and a laser tomography mode with diffraction-limited performance over a 20”x20” FoV. GIRMOS implements multi-object adaptive optics for each of its four integral field spectrographs; it also contains a near infrared imager, which can benefit from both wide and narrowfield AO capabilities. In addition, the Gemini Planetary Imager completed its science mission at Gemini South, is currently being upgraded (GPI2.0) and is planned to be installed at Gemini North in 2025. A wide-field Ground-Layer Adaptive Optics feasibility study using an Adaptive Secondary Mirror has been completed and preparations for a Conceptual Design Study are underway. This paper summarizes our operational adaptive optics (AO) facilities, the status of our ongoing AO development projects, and finally our longer-range observatory AO roadmap.
ALTAIR, the Gemini North single conjugated Adaptive Optics system has been Gemini AO facility instrument since 2003. Used every single night for the Gemini primary mirror tunning, ALTAIR has been allocated for GEMini NIR instruments science programs including the Near Infrared Integral-field Spectrograph (NIFS), the Near Infrared Imager (NIRI) and the Gemini multi-function spectrograph (GNIRS). In this proceeding, we propose to review the actual performances of our 20 years old AO system. We will also describe the main instrument failure (Slow focus camera, Deformable mirror) that we had to fix to keep ALTAIR alive until the GNAO instrument venue (5 years from now).
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a dedicated high-contrast imaging facility instrument. After six years, GPI has helped establish that the occurrence rate of Jovian planets peaks near the snow. GPI 2.0 is expected to achieve deeper contrasts, especially at small inner working angles, to extend GPI’s operating range to fainter stars, and to broaden its scientific capabilities. GPI shipped from Gemini South in 2022 and is undergoing an upgrade as part of a relocation to Gemini North. We present the status of the upgrades including replacing the current wavefront sensor with an EMCCD-based pyramid wavefront sensor, adding a broadband low spectral resolution prism, new apodized-pupil Lyot coronagraph designs, upgrades of the calibration wavefront sensor and increased queue operability. Further we discuss the progress of reintegrating these components into the new system and the expected performance improvements in the context of GPI 2.0’s enhanced science capabilities.
Polarimetric observations can provide important information on many astrophysical phenomena beyond that available via conventional imaging and spectroscopy alone. As a first step toward providing Gemini North instrument support for polarimetric observations, an instrument upgrade program is currently under way to bring one of the GPOL polarization modulator units (GPOL-N) into operation in concert with NIRI at Gemini North (GN) to provide an IR imaging polarimetry in the visiting instrument mode. Featuring three deployable trays that accommodate swappable, rotatable polarizing waveplates and calibration polarizers, GPOL is designed to facilitate polarimetric observations over the opticalinfrared wavelength range of 0.3 – 5 μm. When installed on the telescope, GPOL is physically situated inside the Acquisition and Guidance (A&G) unit, and is designed to work in concert with bottom port instruments containing an oninstrument Wollaston prism, such as NIRI. We present here an overview of the functional characteristics of GPOL and the current status of the GPOL+NIRI commissioning project. Following control board and software updates, the GPOL-N unit is currently undergoing further testing as a prelude to refurbishment. We also briefly discuss subsequent Gemini North polarimetric instrumentation plans, which include the possible future commissioning of a visitor mode that combines GPOL with the GNIRS multifunction spectrograph to provide NIR spectropolarimetry, and polarimetric imaging via the GPI 2.0 instrument.
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