Facility-class high-contrast exoplanet imaging systems are currently limited by non-common path quasi-static speckles. Due to these aberrations, the raw contrast saturates after a few seconds. Several active wavefront correction techniques have been developed to remove this noise, with limited success. The NRC Canada is funding two projects, the SPIDERS pathfinder at the Subaru telescope (ETA 2023), and the CAL2 upgrade of the Gemini Planet Imager-2 (ETA 2024), to deploy a modified self-coherent camera (based on FAST) to measure the focal plane electric field, and to apply wavefront corrections in a closed-loop down to 10s of ms in a narrow band. The CAL2 project will focus on developing a facilityclass focal plane & Lyot-stop Low-order sensors using a CRED2 and a SAPHIRA-based camera, reaching up to a gain of 100x in contrast for bright stars. The SPIDERS pathfinder will have a similar configuration with the addition of an imaging Fourier transform spectrograph, allowing the acquisition of a 3.3” diagonal FOV to up to R-20,000 in the NIR to perform advanced spectral differential imaging at a high-spectral resolution to search and characterize exoplanets. These projects will serve as the foundation to develop similar systems for future ground-/space-based telescopes, and be an important step toward the development of instruments to search for life signatures in the atmosphere of exoplanets.
Optical chopping is a step taken to acquire calibrated images for high-contrast instruments such as our SPIDERS pathfinder, the CAL2.0 Gemini Planet Imager 2.0 upgrade, and other future projects. A unique design with smooth, continuous, and slow operation is needed to blink the fringed and unfringed images for dim and bright stars. The Ultra-Low Speed Optical Chopper (ULSOC) must blink between 0.05Hz and 100Hz with noise-free operation, stop in the ‘on’ or ‘off’ position, and have its timing controlled by an external trigger. Silicone dampers are utilized to ensure it is vibration-isolated from other components in the system. The self-calibrating system accepts any chopping wheel between 10-30 blades without the need to reconfigure software and will find its home position on every power-up. The ULSOC communicates serially to start and stop as needed during operation. Long operational periods (during on-sky observations) over a lifetime of at least 10 years, closed-loop stepper-servo control and optical feedback from the chopper wheel guarantees accurate and repeatable velocity and position. Initial prototypes show that smooth and noise-free operation are possible for the desired speed ranges, and vibration is well-managed. Further development this year will lead to a fully functional device to be tested on-sky with our SPIDERS instrument and lead the way to revisions down the road for future projects.
NRC’s NEW-EARTH Lab has demonstrated in the laboratory a Self-Coherent Camera (SCC) concept combined with a Tilt-Gaussian-Vortex focal plane mask (FPM). This speckle suppression technique, a.k.a. Fast Atmospheric SCC Technique (FAST), can enhance the contrast up to 100 times. Based on this success, NRC is now building SPIDERS, a visitor instrument for Subaru telescope to be installed on the infrared Nasmyth platform behind AO188 and the new Subaru Beam Switcher. The beam can be either shared between SPIDERS and SCExAO for simultaneous observations or sent entirely to only one instrument. SPIDERS should also benefit from the upcoming AO188 deformable mirror (DM) upgrade (64x64 actuators) turning A188 to AO3k. The key-components of SPIDERS are an ALPAO DM468, used as a second-stage AO correction, a pupil apodizer mask, a Tilt-Gaussian FPM, a Lyot stop, a beam-splitter feeding (i), a C-RED2 camera imaging a 5” FoV in narrow bands and (ii), an imaging Fourier-Transform Spectrograph and a SAPHIRA camera for spectroscopy up to R~20,000 over a 3.3” FoV. SPIDERS optical design is fully reflective up to the FPM to avoid chromatic aberrations and reduce the number of surfaces. Two off-axis ellipsoid mirrors are enough to form the pupil planes required on the DM and the apodizer mask, and the f/64 focus on the FPM. Only lenses are used from the FPM up to the C-RED2 camera to mitigate the sensitivity of the SCC to vibrations. The Lyot stop reflects the blocked light to a camera acting as a Low-Order Wavefront Sensor complementing the SCC focal plane wavefront sensing.
Direct imaging of exoplanets can be used to characterize exoplanets by spectroscopy of their atmospheres. Coronagraphs are required to suppress the diffraction effects by blocking the starlight, however, residual wavefront error scatters starlight in the science images, losing faint exoplanet photons in stellar noise. The performance of a coronagraphic system is thus contingent upon how efficiently the wavefront aberrations are minimized. Lyot-stop low-order wavefront sensor (LLOWFS) is a well-established sensor that senses the light rejected by the focal plane mask and corrects low-order aberrations upstream of the coronagraph. Previous versions of the LLOWFS sensed the residual starlight at the defocused focal plane. However, on the NRC's NEW-EARTH high-contrast imaging testbed, pupil-plane images of LLOWFS have been used to address both Zernike and Fourier modes. The goal of the testbed is to develop SPIDERS/Subaru which is the technology demonstrator of the CAL2 unit of the upcoming Gemini Planet Imager 2.0 (GPI 2.0). Both SPIDERS and CAL2 will address the low-order modes for stabilizing speckles, and demonstrate an active suppression of speckles using the Fast Atmospheric Self-Coherent Camera Technique (FAST) by creating a region of up to 10-7 contrast at small angles. Thus, obtaining sub-nanometric pointing stability using the LLOWFS is crucial for achieving stable contrast results on the bench and on-sky. Here, we present LLOWFS closed-loop laboratory results under simulated post-Adaptive Optics residuals of GPI 2.0 and simulations of the LLOWFS and FAST sensors for SPIDERS.
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