What Is This On The Edge Of The Solar System?

“The Pluto-Charon result is of timely interest to those of us wanting to understand the orbital dynamics of this pair for the 2015 encounter by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft,” said Steve Howell of the NASA Ames Research Center, who led the study. In addition, Howell notes that NASA’s Kepler mission, which has already proven a powerful exoplanet discovery tool, will benefit greatly from this technique.

Kepler identifies planet candidates by repeatedly measuring the change in brightness of more than 150,000 stars to detect when a planet passes in front of, or affects the brightness of, its host star. Speckle imaging with the Gemini telescope will provide Kepler’s follow-up program with a doubling in its ability to resolve objects and validate Earth-like planets. It also offers a 3- to 4-magnitude sensitivity increase for the sources observed by the team. That’s about a 50-fold increase in sensitivity in the observations Howell and his team made at Gemini. “This is an enormous gain in the effort underway to confirm small Earth-size planets,” Howell added.

To institute this effort Howell and his team –– which included Elliott Horch (Southern Connecticut State University), Mark Everett (National Optical Astronomy Observatory), and David Ciardi (NASA Exoplanet Science Institute/Caltech) –– temporarily installed a camera, called the Differential Speckle Survey Instrument (DSSI), among the suite of instruments mounted on the Gemini telescope.

“This was a fantastic opportunity to bring DSSI to Gemini North this past July,” said Horch. “In just a little over half an hour of Pluto observations, collecting light with the large Gemini mirror, we obtained the best resolution ever with the DSSI instrument –– it was stunning!”

The resolution obtained in the observations, about 20 milliarcseconds, easily corresponds to separating a pair of automobile headlights in Providence, Rhode Island, from San Francisco, California. To achieve this level of definition, Gemini obtained a large number of very quick “snapshots” of Pluto and Charon. The researchers then reconstructed them into a single image after subtracting the blurring effects and ever-changing speckled artifacts caused by turbulence in the atmosphere and other optical aberrations. With enough snapshots (each image was exposed for only 60 milliseconds or about 1/20 of a second) only the light from the actual objects remains constant, and the artifacts reveal their transient nature, eventually canceling each other out.

DSSI was built at SCSU between 2007-2008 as a part of a United States National Science Foundation Astronomical Instrumentation grant and mounted on the Gemini North telescope for a limited observing run. The instrument is likely to return to Gemini North for observations in mid-2013 for general user programs from across the international Gemini partnership. Any such arrangement will be announced along with the call for proposals for Semester 13B, in February 2013.

This work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and NASA’s Kepler discovery mission and will be published in the journalPublications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in October 2012.

Background History of DSSI

The Differential Speckle Survey Instrument (DSSI) was built at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) between 2007-2008 as a part of a NSF Astronomical Instrumentation grant on which Elliott Horch was the principal investigator. Together with student collaborators, Horch designed and assembled the instrument, and wrote the instrument control software. In 2008 DSSI was shipped to the WIYN Observatory at Kitt Peak, where it has been used since September 2008 for both Kepler follow-up observations and a NSF-funded project to study binary stars discovered by Hipparcos. In late 2009, the detectors for the instrument were upgraded from two low-noise CCDs to two electron-multiplying CCDs, one purchased by the Kepler Science Office and the other by SCSU. DSSI is the world’s first two-channel speckle imaging instrument.

The Gemini Observatory is an international collaboration with two identical 8-meter telescopes. The Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope is located on Mauna Kea, Hawai’i (Gemini North) and the other telescope on Cerro Pachón in central Chile (Gemini South); together the twin telescopes provide full coverage over both hemispheres of the sky. The telescopes incorporate technologies that allow large, relatively thin mirrors, under active control, to collect and focus both visible and infrared radiation from space.

The Gemini Observatory provides the astronomical communities in seven partner countries with state-of-the-art astronomical facilities that allocate observing time in proportion to each country’s contribution. In addition to financial support, each country also contributes significant scientific and technical resources. The national research agencies that form the Gemini partnership include: the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the Canadian National Research Council (NRC), the Chilean Comisión Nacional de Investigación Cientifica y Tecnológica (CONICYT), the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Argentinean Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva, and the Brazilian Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação. The observatory is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the NSF. The NSF also serves as the executive agency for the international partnership.