1. Robo-AO: Demo Period
Nicholas Law

2. The Demo Period 4 weeks on the Palomar 60” Q2 2011
Mission: do lots of great science

3. What’s unique to Robo-AO?
Large surveys
High efficiency
Continual availability
Great sky coverage
Visible-light & high speed imaging

4. Demo Period Goals Variety of science programs Extragalactic Transients
Stars
Planets
...
Cover all Robo-AO unique capabilities
Large surveys
High efficiency
Visible-light AO
High NIR Strehl
Resulting in great science... and a large group of papers

5. Survey Programs Binarity survey
all spectral types, companions down to brown dwarfs for most
cover range of stellar parameter space with one instrument and one coherent survey

6. Monitoring
Trent Dupuy 2008, 2009

7. High availability programs
New
Old
Subtraction
The Palomar Transient Factory finds 1 transient candidate every ~10 minutes
Many found near galactic nuclei - how do we separate them?

8. High-speed, high-resolution imaging
5/17/2010
Astronomy Tea Talk 2

9. How much time is one month?
Overheads
35-40 secs: telescope pointing & settling
20 secs: Centering on target & verification
10 secs: WFS calibration, wait for loop to close
Assume:
no science in first week
50% uptime
30% weather losses
Conservatively ~60 hours, or 1800 targets at 2 mins per target
However, we need about 5000 targets for contingency!

10. Types of demo programs Large, 1000 targets
Need to be very exciting papers -- only 2-3 possible
High-risk if incomplete
Medium, targets
10+ projects
Lower risk
Others
eg. transient followup (equiv. to 4m in sensitivity...)

11. Demo period capabilities
General AO imaging
NIR & Visible [specific NIR camera TBD]
Dithering, standard observation sequences, etc.
Visible-light high-speed imaging
Efficiency will improve throughout run
Likely semi-robotic system
Probably manual target lists to start with
Maybe some simple scheduling by end of demo

12. Decision process Projects defined by September
Robo-AO team will collaborate, provide data, and support for data reduction, in exchange for paper authorship
Mini-TAC process within Robo-AO team
Current science team:
C. Baranec, R. Dekany, J. Johnson, M. Kasliwal, M. van Kerkwijk, S. Kulkarni, N. Law, T. Morton, E. Ofek, A. Ramaprakash, R. Riddle, S. Tendulkar