TY - JOUR
T1 - The MKID exoplanet camera for Subaru SCEXAO
AU - Walter, Alexander B.
AU - Fruitwala, Neelay
AU - Steiger, Sarah
AU - Bailey, John I.
AU - Zobrist, Nicholas
AU - Swimmer, Noah
AU - Lipartito, Isabel
AU - Smith, Jennifer Pearl
AU - Meeker, Seth R.
AU - Bockstiegel, Clint
AU - Coiffard, Gregoire
AU - Dodkins, Rupert
AU - Szypryt, Paul
AU - Davis, Kristina K.
AU - Daal, Miguel
AU - Bumble, Bruce
AU - Collura, Giulia
AU - Guyon, Olivier
AU - Lozi, Julien
AU - Vievard, Sebastien
AU - Jovanovic, Nemanja
AU - Martinache, Frantz
AU - Currie, Thayne
AU - Mazin, Benjamin A.
N1 - Funding Information:
Sarah Steiger and Neelay Fruitwala are supported by a grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation. Kristina K. Davis is supported by the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship program under award number 1801983. Jennifer P. Smith and Nicholas Zobrist are both supported by a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship. Isabel Lipar-tito is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant number 1650114. Frantz Martinache is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement CoG—683029).
Funding Information:
The development of SCExAO was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant-in-Aid for Research #23340051, #26220704, #23103002, #19H00703 & #19H00695), the Astrobiology Center of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Japan, the Mt. Cuba Foundation and the directorʼs contingency fund at Subaru Telescope. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community, and are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - We present the MKID Exoplanet Camera (MEC), a z through J band (800–1400 nm) integral field spectrograph located behind The Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) at the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea that utilizes Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) as the enabling technology for high contrast imaging. MEC is the first permanently deployed near-infrared MKID instrument and is designed to operate both as an IFU, and as a focal plane wavefront sensor in a multi-kHz feedback loop with SCExAO. The read noise free, fast time domain information attainable by MKIDs allows for the direct probing of fast speckle fluctuations that currently limit the performance of most high contrast imaging systems on the ground and will help MEC achieve its ultimate goal of reaching contrasts of 10−7 at 2λ/D. Here we outline the instrument details of MEC including the hardware, firmware, and data reduction and analysis pipeline. We then discuss MEC’s current on-sky performance and end with future upgrades and plans.
AB - We present the MKID Exoplanet Camera (MEC), a z through J band (800–1400 nm) integral field spectrograph located behind The Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) at the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea that utilizes Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) as the enabling technology for high contrast imaging. MEC is the first permanently deployed near-infrared MKID instrument and is designed to operate both as an IFU, and as a focal plane wavefront sensor in a multi-kHz feedback loop with SCExAO. The read noise free, fast time domain information attainable by MKIDs allows for the direct probing of fast speckle fluctuations that currently limit the performance of most high contrast imaging systems on the ground and will help MEC achieve its ultimate goal of reaching contrasts of 10−7 at 2λ/D. Here we outline the instrument details of MEC including the hardware, firmware, and data reduction and analysis pipeline. We then discuss MEC’s current on-sky performance and end with future upgrades and plans.
KW - Astronomical detectors (84)
KW - Astronomical instrumentation (799)
KW - Unified Astronomy Thesaurus concepts: Direct imaging (387)
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U2 - 10.1088/1538-3873/abc60f
DO - 10.1088/1538-3873/abc60f
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85097400563
VL - 132
SP - 1
EP - 13
JO - Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
JF - Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
SN - 0004-6280
IS - 1018
M1 - 125005
ER -