The award is to fund the development and implementation of a non-redundant mask interferometer for use with the 200 inch Hale Telescope at Mt. Palomar. The mask will be used in conjunction with a high-order adaptive optics system, currently being developed at California Institute of Technology, and will feed an integral field unit spectrograph. This instrument will enable detection of faint companions, such as brown dwarfs and massive planets in close proximity to nearby stars. Many extra-solar planets have already been detected by the indirect technique of high-resolution spectroscopy but this instrument will permit direct imaging at different wavelengths permitting detailed analysis of the size and composition of these massive planets and low-mass stellar companions.
The direct detection of extra-solar planets is a very topical scientific research area and also one which captures the public imagination. The project will be carried out at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and will have high visibility due to the Museum?s public outreach.
We successfully placed non-redundant masks (NRMs) designed to achieve the highest resolution images allowed by the laws of physics on both the Palomar 200-inch telescope's adaptive optics instrument P1640, as well as in a similar, Gemini Planet Imager instrument destined for the 8m Gemini South telescope in 2012. We used Palomar's integral field spectrograph in combination with the mask. As a spin-off we designed, fabricated, and incorporated a non-redundant mask on the successor to Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Two undergraduates worked on their own laboratory test-bed experiments at the American Museum of Natural History and Stony Brook, developing practical, theoretical, software, and data analysis skills. The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institiute undergraduate is joining Johns Hopkins graduate school to continue her work on these telescopes, supported by the PI. The undergraduates presented posters at two professional meetings, and were co-authors on instrument concept papers presented at professional meetings. The Stony Brook testbed data were material in enabling the PI to join the science team of the JWST instrument implementing the mask, and to secure a commitment of approximately 200 hours of guaranteed JWST time. The PI also won three years of NASA funding to extend non-redundant masking to future space telescopes, with a team that includes faculty from the the minority-serving City University of New York Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY BMCC). A Columbia graduate student incorporated the Palomar data into his doctoral thesis, and accepted a post-doctoral position advancing cutting-edge ground-based interferometry at the European Southern Observatory's twin-8m interferometric telescopes. During his thesis work he developed a rigorous analysis pipeline for the data he collected at Palomar. In doing so, he carried out the first observation ever that combines non-redundant aperture mask interferometry with integral field spectroscopy. The added wavelength dimension of his data enabled us to retrieve the low-resolution near-infrared spectrum of the F-dwarf secondary component of the star β CrB, a well- studied spectroscopic binary star. Such accurate spectral measurements of stars merely two angular resolution apart is out of reach of all other existing high contrast techniques. We supported another successful Columbia doctoral student who graduated, accepted a NASA Sagan fellowship at Caltech, and went on to performed the highest contrast aperture masking observations in existence. For this he utilized one of the two 10 m Keck telescope. The principal investigator and a co-investigator developed and co-taught a graduate seminar on high contrast imaging at Stony Brook, where half the students were women. The same co-investigator collected high speed adaptive optics data simultaneous with non-redundant mask observations at Keck, in order to develop our understanding of how to improve ground-based masking data in the future. The principal investigator authored a page entitled "The Rose Center goes to Space" describing NRM mask design and plans to take masking to space on the Hayden Planetarium website, which has international visibility. He gave three public lectures on high contrast science at Stony Brook and one at Columbia. These lectures are attended by middle and high school students and their teachers. He also mentored high school students at the Stony Brook Laser Teaching Center, which is active in the NSF Women in Science & Engineering (WISE) program. Laser Teaching Center alumni often place regionally and nationally in Intel and Siemens-Westinghouse competitions, and go on to baccalaureates and higher degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) fields.
