PALM-3000: EXOPLANET ADAPTIVE OPTICS FOR THE 5 m HALE TELESCOPE

By R. Dekany, Jennifer E. Roberts, R. Burruss, A. Bouchez, T. Truong, C. Baranec, S. Guiwits, D. Hale, J. Angione, T. Trinh and 10 more. 2013

98 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe and report first results from PALM-3000, the second-generation astronomical adaptive optics (AO) facility for the 5.1 m Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory. PALM-3000 has been engineered for high-contrast imaging and emission spectroscopy of brown dwarfs and large planetary mass bodies at near-infrared wavelengths around bright stars, but also supports general natural guide star use to V ≈ 17. Using its unique 66 × 66 actuator deformable mirror, PALM-3000 has thus far demonstrated residual wavefront errors of 141 nm rms under ∼1″ seeing conditions. PALM-3000 can provide phase conjugation correction over a 6.″4 × 6.″4 working region at λ = 2.2 μm, or full electric field (amplitude and phase) correction over approximately one-half of this field. With optimized back-end instrumentation, PALM-3000 is designed to enable 10−7 contrast at 1″ angular separation, including post-observation speckle suppression processing. While continued optimization of the AO system is ongoing, we have already successfully commissioned five back-end instruments and begun a major exoplanet characterization survey, Project 1640.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Timothy Morton
2. J. Johnson
3. E. Petigura
4. Andrew W. Howard
5. A. Mann
6. D. Charbonneau
7. C. Dressing
8. B. Fulton

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. A. Tokovinin
2. B. Mason
3. W. Hartkopf
4. A. Mann
5. J. Christiansen
6. B. Bowler
7. Joss Bland-Hawthorn
8. Daniel Foreman-Mackey

In Instrumentation

1. Timothy Morton
2. A. Mann
3. C. Dressing
4. J. Johnson
5. D. Charbonneau
6. E. Petigura
7. Andrew W. Howard
8. E. Gaidos

Citations in the corpus

• STELLAR AND PLANETARY PROPERTIES OF K2 CAMPAIGN 1 CANDIDATES AND VALIDATION OF 17 PLANETS, INCLUDING A PLANET RECEIVING EARTH-LIKE INSOLATION (2015, methodology): “…stars with the Palomar High Angular Resolution Observer (PHARO) infrared detector (Hayward et al. 2001) behind the PALM3000 adaptive optics system (Dekany et al. 2013) at the Palomar 5.1 m Hale telescope on the nights of 2015 February 3 and 4 UT. Sky conditions were mostly clear with light cirrus…”
• The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic, and Integrated Properties (2016, methodology): “Large numbers of RR Lyrae stars, identified by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE, Udalski et al. 2008) and Vista Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV, Minniti et al. 2010) surveys, were recently used to map out the old metal-poor population in the bulge (Pietrukowicz et al. 2015 and Dé”
• Imaging Extrasolar Giant Planets (2016, methodology): “The survey consists of two phases, the first (now concluded) with the original Palomar Adaptive Optics System (PALM-241; Troy et al. 2000) and a second ongoing three-year program focusing on nearby massive stars with the upgraded PALM3000 adaptive optics system (Dekany et al. 2013).”
• 197 CANDIDATES AND 104 VALIDATED PLANETS IN K2's FIRST FIVE FIELDS (2016, result): “We also observed 33 stars with PHARO/PALM-3000 (Hayward et al. 2001; Dekany et al. 2013) at the 5 m Hale Telescope and 14 systems with LMIRCam at LBT (Leisenring et al. 2012), all at the K-band.”
• OBSERVATIONS OF HIERARCHICAL SOLAR-TYPE MULTIPLE STAR SYSTEMS (2015, methodology): “The PALM-3000 AO system is a natural guidestar system using two deformable mirrors (Dekany et al. 2013).”