Dr. Saavidra Perera (UC San Diego)

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a high-contrast imaging instrument designed to directly detect and characterize young, Jupiter-mass exoplanets at wide orbits. After six years of operation at Gemini South in Chile, the instrument is being upgraded and relocated to Gemini North in Hawaii as GPI 2.0. GPI helped establish that Jovian-mass planets have a higher occurrence rate at smaller separations (~3-10 AU), motivating several subsystem upgrades. One of the major upgrades is to the adaptive optics (AO) subsystem, which will enable access to fainter targets and increase stability on bright ones. AO design is impossible without a deep understanding of the Earth’s turbulent atmosphere and development in atmospheric profiling techniques. In this talk, I will discuss the effects of atmospheric turbulence on astronomical imaging. In addition, I will present profiling instruments and techniques I have developed to extract key atmospheric parameters that impact AO design, and how that relates to the GPI 2.0's AO upgrades and scientific objectives.