Paper
24 July 1998 Palomar Testbed Interferometer
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Abstract
The Palomar Testbed Interferometer (PTI) is an infrared, phase-tracking interferometer in operation at Palomar Mountain since July 1995. It was funded by NASA for the purpose of developing techniques and methodologies for doing narrowangle astrometry for the purpose of detecting extrasolar planets. The instrument employs active fringe trackingin the infrared (2.0-2.4 μm) to monitor fringe phase. It is a dual-star interferometer; it is able to measure fringes on two separate stars simultaneously. An end-to-end heterodyne laser metrology system is used to monitor the optical path length of the starlight. Recently completed engineering upgrades have improved the initial instrument performance. These upgrades are:extended wavelength coverage, a single mode fiber for spatial filtering, vacuum pipes to relay the beams, accelerometers on the siderostat mirrors and a new baseline. Results of recent astrometry data indicate the instrument is approaching the astrometric limit as set by the atmosphere.
© (1998) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
J. Kent Wallace, Andrew F. Boden, M. Mark Colavita, Philip J. Dumont, Yekta Gursel, Braden E. Hines, Christopher D. Koresko, Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, Benjamin F. Lane, Fabien Malbet, Dean L. Palmer, Xiaopei Pan, Michael Shao, Gautam Vasisht, Gerard Theodore van Belle, and Jeffrey W. Yu "Palomar Testbed Interferometer", Proc. SPIE 3350, Astronomical Interferometry, (24 July 1998); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.317154
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Cited by 5 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Stars

Mirrors

Interferometers

Beam splitters

Telescopes

Spectroscopy

Calibration

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