Enhanced high-dispersion coronagraphy with KPIC phase II: design, assembly and status of sub-modules
Abstract
The Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) is a purpose-built instrument for high-dispersion coronagraphy in the K and L bands on Keck. This instrument will provide the first high resolution (R>30,000) spectra of known directly imaged exoplanets and low-mass brown dwarf companions visible in the northern hemisphere. KPIC is developed in phases. Phase I is currently at Keck in the early operations stage, and the phase II upgrade will deploy in late 2021. The goal of phase II is to maximize the throughput for planet light and minimize the stellar leakage, hence reducing the exposure time needed to acquire spectra with a given signal-to- noise ratio. To achieve this, KPIC phase II exploits several innovative technologies that have not been combined this way before. These include a 1000-element deformable mirror for wavefront correction and speckle control, a set of lossless beam shaping optics to maximize coupling into the fiber, a pupil apodizer to suppress unwanted starlight, a pupil plane vortex mask to enable the acquisition of spectra at and within the diffraction limit, and an atmospheric dispersion compensator. These modules, when combined with the active fiber injection unit present in phase I, will make for a highly efficient exoplanet characterization platform. In this paper, we will present the final design of the optics and opto-mechanics and highlight some innovative solutions we implemented to facilitate all the new capabilities. We will provide an overview of the assembly and laboratory testing of the sub-modules and some of the results. Finally, we will outline the deployment timeline.
Additional Information
© 2020 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). This work was supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation through grants #2019-1312 and #2015-129. G. Ruane was supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-1602444. We thank Dr. Rebecca Jensen-Clem for loaning AOSE for use within the KPIC phase II testing. Part of this work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). W. M. Keck Observatory is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation.The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.Attached Files
Published - 114474U.pdf
Published - SPIE-AS20-419b45fb-7406-ea11-813d-005056be4d05.pdf
Submitted - 2012.06638.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 107247
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20201222-073413143
- 2019-1312
- Heising-Simons Foundation
- 2015-129
- Heising-Simons Foundation
- AST-1602444
- NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- W. M. Keck Foundation
- Created
-
2020-12-22Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Astronomy Department
- Series Name
- Proceedings of SPIE
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 11447