10 papers
Early Exploration of the Scientific Discovery Space for the Habitable Worlds Observatory
Courtney D. Dressing, Danica Adams, Evelyne Alecian +324
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is a future NASA flagship mission concept identified by the Astro2020 Decadal Survey as the highest priority for large space missions. HWO sh…
Ground control to major time-lag: on-sky results of data-driven predictive wavefront control at Keck Observatory
Jules Fowler, Rebeca Jensen-Clem, Sylvain Cetre +12
Directly imaging and characterizing exoplanets requires extreme adaptive optics (XAO), which achieves exquisite wavefront correction over a small (<5") field of view. Temporal erro…
On-sky demonstration of second-stage wavefront control with a photonic lantern
Aditya R. Sengupta, Jordan Diaz, Matthew DeMartino +14
Ground-based direct imaging of exoplanets at high contrast requires precise correction of atmospheric turbulence using adaptive optics (AO). The planet-to-star contrast ratio at sm…
Keck Observatory as an HWO Testbed: validating wavefront sensing and control schemes on a large segmented aperture in parallel with high-contrast science
Maïssa Salama, Rebecca Jensen-Clem, Mahawa Cissé +6
Exoplanet direct imaging allows us to directly probe and characterize an exoplanet's atmosphere, searching for signs of life in its atmospheric signatures. Directly imaging an Eart…
An on-sky investigation into factors limiting the performance of Keck-NIRC2 for conducting infrared high-contrast imaging
Rachel Bowens-Rubin, Maïssa Salama, Jayke S. Nguyen +2
The most common instrument used by the exoplanet/brown dwarf direct imaging community at the W.M. Keck Observatory is currently the NIRC2 near-infrared imager. We performed on-sky…
The Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL) 2.0: A reflective, multi-wavelength rebuild
Rebecca Jensen-Clem, Vincent Chambouleyron, Prince Javier +20
The Santa cruz Extreme Adaptive optics Lab (SEAL) is a visible/near-infrared wavelength testbed designed to support technology development for high contrast imaging on large, segme…
Real-time control and data standardization on various telescopes and benches
Nour Skaf, Rebecca Jensen-Clem, Aaron Hunter +19
Real-time control (RTC) is pivotal for any Adaptive Optics (AO) system, including high-contrast imaging of exoplanets and circumstellar environments. It is the brain of the AO syst…
Reconstruction methods for the phase-shifted Zernike wavefront sensor
Vincent Chambouleyron, Mahawa Cissé, Maïssa Salama +8
The Zernike wavefront sensor (ZWFS) stands out as one of the most sensitive optical systems for measuring the phase of an incoming wavefront, reaching photon efficiencies close to…
Towards understanding interactions between the AO system and segment co-phasing with the vector-Zernike wavefront sensor on Keck
Maïssa Salama, Charlotte Guthery, Vincent Chambouleyron +14
We extend our previous demonstration of the first on-sky primary mirror segment closed-loop control on Keck using a vector-Zernike wavefront sensor (vZWFS), which improved the Stre…
Commissioning results from the Robo-AO-2 facility for rapid visible and near-infrared AO imaging
Christoph Baranec, James Ou, Reed Riddle +16
We installed the next-generation automated laser adaptive optics system, Robo-AO-2, on the University of Hawaii 2.2-m telescope on Maunakea in 2023. We engineered Robo-AO-2 to deli…