Robo-AO: Demo Period

Nicholas Law

The Demo Period

• 4 weeks on the Palomar 60”

• Q2 2011

• Mission: do lots of great science

What’s unique to Robo-AO?

• Large surveys

• High efficiency

• Continual availability

• Great sky coverage

• Visible-light & high speed imaging

Demo Period Goals• Variety of science programs

• Extragalactic• Transients• Stars• Planets• ...

• Cover all Robo-AO unique capabilities

• Large surveys• High efficiency• Visible-light AO• High NIR Strehl

• Resulting in great science... and a large group of papers

Survey Programs

Binarity survey

•all spectral types, companions down to brown dwarfs for most

•cover range of stellar parameter space with one instrument and one coherent survey

Monitoring

Trent Dupuy 2008, 2009

High availability programs

• The Palomar Transient Factory finds 1 transient candidate every ~10 minutes•Many found near galactic nuclei - how do we separate them?

New Old Subtraction

5/17/2010 2Astronomy Tea Talk

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High-speed, high-resolution imaging

How much time is one month?

• Overheads

• 35-40 secs: telescope pointing & settling

• 20 secs: Centering on target & verification

• 10 secs: WFS calibration, wait for loop to close

• Assume:

• no science in first week

• 50% uptime

• 30% weather losses

• Conservatively ~60 hours, or 1800 targets at 2 mins per target

• However, we need about 5000 targets for contingency!

Types of demo programs

• Large, 1000 targets

• Need to be very exciting papers -- only 2-3 possible

• High-risk if incomplete

• Medium, 100-300 targets

• 10+ projects

• Lower risk

• Others

• eg. transient followup (equiv. to 4m in sensitivity...)

Demo period capabilities

• General AO imaging

• NIR & Visible [specific NIR camera TBD]

• Dithering, standard observation sequences, etc.

• Visible-light high-speed imaging

• Efficiency will improve throughout run

• Likely semi-robotic system

• Probably manual target lists to start with

• Maybe some simple scheduling by end of demo

Decision process

• Projects defined by September

• Robo-AO team will collaborate, provide data, and support for data reduction, in exchange for paper authorship

• Mini-TAC process within Robo-AO team

• Current science team:

• C. Baranec, R. Dekany, J. Johnson, M. Kasliwal, M. van Kerkwijk, S. Kulkarni, N. Law, T. Morton, E. Ofek, A. Ramaprakash, R. Riddle, S. Tendulkar