The Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer Awakens

Nemanja Jovanovic, Caltech, July 31st 2018

The Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) (PI, Dimitri Mawet) is amongst the first instruments to be built with the primary goal of enabling high dispersion coronagraphy (HDC). HDC is based on suppressing the light of the host with a high performance coronagraph and then instead of using an integral field spectrograph to study the entire field, common to most high contrast imagers, the light from the known planet is injected into a single mode fiber placed at its location in the field, which feeds a high resolution spectrograph to obtain a high resolution spectrum of the exoplanet atmosphere.

KPIC consists of several modules which include a NIR pyramid wavefront sensor which will drive both the 349 actuator deformable mirror (DM) in Keck II AO and a new 1k DM (BMC), a fiber injection unit which will facilitate efficient injection of the corrected light in K and L band into a bundle of single-mode fibers and a fiber extraction unit that will feed diffraction limited light into NIRSPEC for dispersion.

During the weekend of the 6th-8th of July, 2018, we successfully deployed the fiber extraction unit to Keck. The deployment went smoothly and we now have a module that can feed diffraction limited light from a fiber into a seeing limited instrument efficiently. This is an exciting milestone for the KPIC project and we look forward to the deployment of the pyramid wavefront sensor and the fiber injection unit in September and first light at the end of the year.