The ASTRA Extension Of the Keck Interferometer -- What Dual-field Interferometry Will Do For You!

Details The ASTRA Extension Of the Keck Interferometer -- What Dual-field Interferometry Will Do For You! The ASTRA Extension Of the Keck Interferometer -- What Dual-field Interferometry Will Do For You!

Mar 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008aas...21116017p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #160.17

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The Keck Interferometer (KI) combines the two 10m Keck telescopes with a baseline separation of 85m, and is one of the two large aperture optical long baseline interferometric (OLBI) facilities in the world. The KI is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The 10m telescope diameters provide a unique sensitivity advantage and has lead to several 'first OLBI' science in the IR such as visibility measurements of an AGN. The visibility (V2) and Nuller modes, are in operation and offered to the Keck community. Now a new major development effort is underway to broaden the astrophysical applications of this unique instrument: the ASTRA upgrade.
ASTRA stands for the ASTrometric and phase-Referenced Astronomy upgrade of the KI project. ASTRA has been funded by the NSF-Major Research Instrumentation program and will be implemented in three steps over the next 3 years. Besides the NSF engagement a number of science institutes contribute to the ASTRA collaboration to advance and profit from large-aperture OLBI.
This contribution will present the three modes of ASTRA each of which will overcome current sensitivity limitations by continuous correction for phase distortions induced by the turbulent atmosphere: (i) self-referenced spectroscopy stabilizes fringes on-axis and enable higher spectral resolution up to a few thousands (ii) dual-field visibility measurements stand for integration beyond the atmospheric coherence time to reach K=15mag on science targets while locking the fringe tracker on an offset guide star (iii) the narrow-angle astrometry mode eventually will measure distances between a pair of stars within the iso-planatic patch to an accuracy of less than 100 uas.

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