Speaker
Description
In order for ESO’s Planetary Camera and Spectrograph for the ELT (ELT-PCS) to image rocky exoplanets at small angular separations around nearby stars, each component of the instrument (IFU, XAO, Coronagraph, postprocessing etc.) will need to operate at the maximum possible performance. As a result, the R&D phase of the instrument development, recently kicked off in September 2024 at ESO Garching, presents an opportunity to develop and explore new high contrast imaging techniques before the design and build phases begin. In this talk we will present both current experiments and future plans for ELT-PCS R&D activities at Oxford into integral field spectrograph (IFS) technologies. This includes early results from our modular IFS testbench system with which the performance of a novel “twisted” image slicer-based IFU and a traditional BIGRE-like lenslet IFU will be compared. We will further discuss plans to test the two IFU technologies through integration of our testbench IFS with the GHOST XAO system at ESO in the coming months. Finally, high dispersion spectroscopy (R≥100,000) across the Oxygen A-band at 765 nm has been highlighted as a likely requirement of the ELT-PCS instrument due to its status as a key biosignature, and to further isolate planet signals from speckles which contain only the stellar spectrum. We will outline plans to adapt the current testbench design to include a high-dispersion spectrograph which may be used to explore the limitations of these techniques on the testbench.
