The Science Cases for Next Generation AO at Keck

Date and Venue

This workshop is part of the CfAO Spring Retreat at UCSC, and will take place on Wednesday March 28 in ISB room 221. Map of how to get to the CfAO and ISB room 221 from the Core West Parking Structure: CfAO_SpringRetreatMap.pdf

The list of attendees can be found here. Note that this list is not 100% accurate. We will do our best to keep it up to date.

We would like to encourage workshop participants to arrive on Tuesday. There will be a plenary session to report on recent progress in the various CfAO Themes on Tuesday afternoon, as well as a wine tasting and banquet on Tuesday evening. The leader of the wine tasting will be Professor Joseph Miller from UCSC. His topic will be "Think Globally, Drink Locally - The Wines of Santa Cruz County and Environs".

Agenda

To see the Agenda, click here. During the workshop we will upload pdf files of the presentations to the Agenda web page.

Reference Materials

* Release 1 of NGAO Science Case Requirements Document

Background and Goals for the Workshop

The Keck Observatory is funding a design study for their "Next Generation Adaptive Optics" system, or NGAO. A key part of the design effort is developing a "Science Case Requirements Document" which describes what important new science can be done at different levels of performance of the new AO system and back-end instruments. Several successive "releases" of the Science Case Requirements Document are planned, so that there can be significant iteration between the progressing AO system design and the science that can be done with such a design.

Release 1 of the Science Case Requirements Document analyzed the first key science cases; these were selected because they "pushed" the performance of the new AO system in specific ways. Here is a list of the science cases in Release 1, as well as the AO design issues that they impacted the most:

• Multiplicity, Size, and Shape of Minor Planets
  • Visible-light AO performance
  • High-contrast AO
  • Low-resolution spectroscopy requirements
• Imaging and Characterization of Extrasolar Planets around Nearby Stars
  • High-contrast AO
  • Low wavefront error
  • Low-resolution spectroscopy requirements
• Measurement of General Relativistic Effects in the Galactic Center
  • Precision astrometry
  • Accuracy of radial-velocity measurements
  • Tip-tilt correction accuracy
• Galaxy Assembly and Star Formation History
  • Low backgrounds
  • Design of a deployable integral field spectrograph
  • High sky coverage requirement

This workshop will assemble the people who have been working on the above four science cases, as well as those who might be able to contribute to the science requirements for the remaining science cases which we plan to include in Release 2 of the Science Case Requirements Document:

• Solar System: Titan, Io, Jovian planet icy moons
• Galactic astronomy: Protostellar objects, Debris disks
• Extragalactic astronomy: Strong lensing, AGNs, QSO host galaxies

We will discuss (and modify if necessary) the science requirements that have been developed to date, and we will launch the science requirements development process for the new bullets listed immediately above. This will be a real working meeting (the original definition of the term "workshop") and there will be time for lots of discussion and debate.

-- ClaireMax - 25 Mar 2007