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Paths to robust exoplanet science yield margin for the Habitable Worlds Observatory
Bryson, Steve; Tuchow, Noah W.; Stark, Christopher C. +11 more
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will seek to detect and characterize potentially Earth-like planets around other stars. To ensure that the mission achieves the Astro2020 Decadal's recommended goal of 25 exoEarth candidates (EECs), we must take into account the probabilistic nature of exoplanet detections and provide a "science margin" to bu…
Telescope control software and proto-model siderostat for the SDSS-V Local Volume Mapper
Kollmeier, Juna A.; Drory, Niv; Froning, Cynthia S. +19 more
The fifth Sloan Digital Sky Survey Local Volume Mapper (LVM) is a wide-field integral field unit survey that uses an array of four 160 mm fixed telescopes with siderostats to minimize the number of moving parts. An individual telescope observes the science or calibration field independently and is synchronized with the science exposure. We develop…
High-angular resolution and high contrast observations from Y to L band at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer with the Asgard Instrumental suite
Kraus, Stefan; Gardner, Tyler; Ertel, Steve +25 more
European Southern Observatory (ESO)'s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), Paranal, Chile, is one of the most proficient observatories in the world for high angular resolution astronomy. It has hosted several interferometric instruments operating in various bandwidths in the infrared. As a result, the VLTI has yielded countless discoveries …
Vortex fiber nulling for exoplanet observations: implementation and first light
Fitzgerald, Michael P.; Ren, Bin B.; Jovanovic, Nemanja +31 more
Vortex fiber nulling (VFN) is a single-aperture interferometric technique for detecting and characterizing exoplanets separated from their host star by less than a diffracted beam width. VFN uses a vortex mask and single-mode fiber to selectively reject starlight while coupling off-axis planet light with a simple optical design that can be readily…
AIROPA IV: Validating point spread function reconstruction on various science cases
Lu, Jessica R.; Fitzgerald, Michael P.; Do, Tuan +7 more
We present an analysis of six independent on-sky datasets taken with the Keck-II/NIRC2 instrument. Using the off-axis point spread function (PSF) reconstruction software AIROPA, we extract stellar astrometry, photometry, and other fitting metrics to characterize the performance of this package. We test the effectiveness of AIROPA to reconstruct th…
Spectrally dispersed kernel phase interferometry with SCExAO/CHARIS: proof of concept and calibration strategies
Martinache, Frantz; Chaushev, Alexander; Sallum, Steph +7 more
Kernel phase interferometry (KPI) is a data processing technique that allows for the detection of asymmetries (such as companions or disks) in high-Strehl images, close to and within the classical diffraction limit. We show that KPI can successfully be applied to hyperspectral image cubes generated from integral field spectrographs (IFSs). We demo…
Understanding the evolution of radiation damage on the Gaia CCDs after 72 months at L2
Seabroke, George; Ahmed, Saad; Holland, Andrew +5 more
The European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft has been operating in L2 ever since its launch in December 2013 with a payload that includes 106 scientific charge-coupled devices (CCDs). Due to the predicted radiation environment at the pre-flight testing stage in addition to the high level of accuracy demanded by the science objectives, the non-ioniz…
Lessons learned from SPHERE for the astrometric strategy of the next generation of exoplanet imaging instruments
Henning, Thomas; Boccaletti, Anthony; Wahhaj, Zahed +14 more
Measuring the orbits of directly imaged exoplanets requires precise astrometry at the milliarcsec level over long periods of time due to their wide separation to the stars (≳10 au) and long orbital period (≳20 yr). To reach this challenging goal, a specific strategy was implemented for the instrument Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Re…
Commissioning and improvements of the instrumentation and launch of the scientific exploitation of OARPAF, the Regional Astronomical Observatory of the Antola Park
Righi, Chiara; Landoni, Marco; Ricci, Davide +18 more
The OARPAF telescope is an 80-cm-diameter optical telescope installed in the Antola Mount Regional Reserve, in Northern Italy. We present the results of the characterization of the site, as well as developments and interventions that have been implemented, with the goal of exploiting the facility for scientific and educational purposes. During the…
Revised astrometric calibration of the Gemini Planet Imager
Duchêne, Gaspard; Esposito, Thomas M.; Oppenheimer, Rebecca +49 more
We present a revision to the astrometric calibration of the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), an instrument designed to achieve the high contrast at small angular separations necessary to image substellar and planetary-mass companions around nearby, young stars. We identified several issues with the GPI data reduction pipeline (DRP) that significantly a…