This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Telescopes on the ground must observe objects in deep space through the interference of the earth's atmosphere. As light passes through the atmosphere it gets spread out by turbulence due to wind shear and changes in temperature and pressure within the atmospheric layers. These effects reduce the resolving power of earth-based telescopes. This difficulty can be overcome to a large extent by monitoring a bright star near the object of interest and looking for the rapidly varying distortions and displacements of the star's image that are introduced as its light passes through the atmosphere. These "guide star" signals are fed into an Adaptive Optics (AO) system that uses a "wavefront sensor" and a "deformable mirror" to restore the image to (nearly) what would be seen from above the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, AO systems are very complex, expensive, and require considerable expertise to maintain and operate. Because of these factors, AO is currently limited to large telescopes. There are many interesting astronomical programs that would benefit from the higher resolution imaging capabilities enabled by AO, but only a handful of large telescopes currently have such systems. Dr. Philip Choi, an Assistant Professor and astronomer at Pomona College in California, is pursuing an idea to develop a low-cost AO system specifically for modest sized telescopes. He will build it and install it on the 1-meter telescope at JPL's Table Mountain Observatory. The telescope is owned and operated by Pomona and Harvey Mudd Colleges and the AO instrumentation will make high-resolution imaging available for student training and faculty and student research at Pomona College, Harvey Mudd College, and Sonoma State University.
Specific Objectives: 1) The primary scientific objectives for developing AO capabilities on our 1-meter telescope are: o To enhance our ongoing TMO science programs with a factor of 5-10 improvement in image resolution and open up new avenues of research and new collaborations that will maximally benefit from high resolution monitoring capabilities. o To serve as an on-sky testbed for advancing new wavefront sensing technologies such as pyramid wavefront sensing , spatial filtered wavefront sensors and Fourier-based reconstructors. 2) The primary broader impact goal is to introduce adaptive optics to a broad audience that includes, but is not limited to physics, astronomy and engineering students. 3) The primary training objective for this instrument is to introduce adaptive optics technology and techniques to a broad range of students and to train a generation of undergraduates on both astronomical research and instrument design fronts, thereby simultaneously filling the future AO science and engineering pipelines. Project Outcomes: We have achieved both of our primary science objectives by 1) demonstrating near diffraction-limited image quality with KAPAO-prime down to visible wavelengths and 2) transforming KAPAO-alpha into a lab testbed instrument that will serve as a development testbed for advanced AO techniques prior to on-sky implementation. Our current objective is to continue on-sky performance testing of our system and begin facility science operation. We have successfully designed, fabricated and implemented two astronomical adaptive optics instruments over the course of the reporting period. The first, KAPAO-Alpha was designed around low-cost, off-the-shelf optics and some testbed grade components as a test of our design. That instrument was successfully integrated onto our Table Mountain observatory 1-meter telescope during the Spring and Summer of 2012. The second, final facility instrument, KAPAO-Prime was designed in parallel, but fabricated and integrated during the summer of 2013 after performance verification of KAPAO-alpha had been achieved. First light observations for KAPAO-prime were undertaken at the end of summer 2013. Regarding our student training objectives, fifteen different undergraduate students have made significant contributions over the course of the project. Student involvement has come in the form of both summer and year-long research internships and has produced six senior research theses, with two more in progress. Of the ten students who have graduated so far, five have gone onto doctoral programs in physics, astrophysics, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science and three more have gone directly into engineering industry positions. In addition to the undergraduate students that we’ve worked with, the KAPAO project has been incorporated into the Pomona College Academy for Youth Success (PAYS) program. The PAYS program offers a multifaceted approach to prepare and support high achieving low-income, first-generation high school students of color for admission to and success in college. As part of the PAYS program, rising seniors engage in summer research opportunities and for two summers the KAPAO project incorporated twelves rising senior high school students in a month-long research project to aid in the design of the KAPAO instrument. All of those students are currently enrolled in colleges ranging from UC Berkeley to Claremont McKenna and Pomona College. Beyond the PAYS program, the KAPAO project has been a regular participant in the AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) program, offering adaptive optics lectures to large groups of under-represented secondary school students from all over the greater Los Angeles area.
