Characterization of porosity, structure, and mechanical properties of electrospun SiOC fiber mats

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Optical turbulence profiling with SloDAR in the Canadian High Arctic

The Earth's polar regions offer unique advantages for ground-based astronomical observations with its cold and dry climate, long periods of darkness, and the potential for exquisite image quality. We present preliminary results from a site-testing campaign during nighttime from October to November 2012 at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL), on a 610-m high ridge near the Eureka weatherstation on Ellesmere Island, Canada. A Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor was employed, using the Slope Detection and Ranging (SloDAR) method. This instrument (Mieda et al, this conference) was designed to measure the altitude, strength and variability of atmospheric turbulence, in particular for operation under Arctic conditions. First SloDAR optical turbulence profiles above PEARL show roughly half of the optical turbulence confined to the boundary layer, below about 1 km, with the majority of the remainder in one or two thin layers between 2 km and 5 km, or above. The median seeing during this campaign was measured to be 0.65 arcsec.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye

Performance of the integral field spectrograph for the Gemini Planet Imager

We present performance results, from in-lab testing, of the Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS) for the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI). GPI is a facility class instrument for the Gemini Observatory with the primary goal of directly detecting young Jovian planets. The GPI IFS is based on concepts from the OSIRIS instrument at Keck and utilizes an infrared transmissive lenslet array to sample a rectangular 2.8 x 2.8 arcsecond field of view. The IFS provides low-resolution spectra across five bands between 1 and 2.5 \u3bcm. Alternatively, the dispersing element can be replaced with a Wollaston prism to provide broadband polarimetry across the same five filter bands. The IFS construction was based at the University of California, Los Angeles in collaboration with the Universit\ue9 de Montr\ue9al, Immervision and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. During its construction, we encountered an unusual noise source from microphonic pickup by the Hawaii-2RG detector. We describe this noise and how we eliminated it through vibration isolation. The IFS has passed its preship review and was shipped to University of California, Santa Cruz at the end of 2011 for integration with the remaining sub-systems of GPI. The IFS has been integrated with the rest of GPI and is delivering high quality spectral datacubes of GPI's coronagraphic field.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye

Test results for the Gemini Planet Imager data reduction pipeline

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a new facility instrument for the Gemini Observatory designed to detect and characterize planets and debris disks orbiting nearby stars; its science camera is a near infrared integral field spectrograph. We have developed a data pipeline for this instrument, which will be made publicly available to the community. The GPI data reduction pipeline (DRP) incorporates all necessary image reduction and calibration steps for high contrast imaging in both the spectral and polarimetric modes, including datacube generation, wavelength solution, astrometric and photometric calibrations, and speckle suppression via ADI and SSDI algorithms. It is implemented in IDL as a flexible modular system, and includes both command line and graphical interface tools including a customized viewer for GPI datacubes. This GPI data reduction pipeline is currently working very well, and is in use daily processing data during the instrument's ongoing integration and test period at UC Santa Cruz. Here we summarize the results from recent pipeline tests, and present reductions of instrument test data taken with GPI. We will continue to refine and improve these tools throughout the rest of GPI's testing and commissioning, and they will be released to the community, including both IDL source code and compiled versions that can be used without an IDL license.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye