ES-03-0023

Upgrading the Gemini Planet Imager to GPI 2.0

Saavidra Perera, Quinn Konopacky , Jeffrey Chilcote, Joeleff Fitzsimmon, Randall Hamper, Bruce Macintosh, Christian Marois, Dmitry Savransky, Remmi Soummer , Jean-Pierre Veran, Guido Agapito , Arlene Aleman, S. Mark Ammons, Marco Bonaglia, Marc-Andre Boucher, Maeve Curliss, Robert J De Rosa, Clarissa Do O, Jennifer Dunn, Simone Esposito, Guillaume Filion, Dan Kerley, Jean-Thomas Landry, Olivier Lardiere, Vincent Chambouleyron, Daniel Levinstein, Duan Li, Mary Anne Limbach , Alex Madurowicz, Jerome Maire, Maxwell Millar-Blanchaer, Bryony Nickson, Eric L Nielsen, Jayke Nguyen, Meiji Nguyen, Dillon Peng, Marshall D Perrin, Emiel Por, Lisa Poyneer, Laurent Pueyo, Fredrik Rantakyro, Brian Sands, Eckhart Spalding, Kaitlyn Summey

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a high-contrast imaging instrument designed to directly detect and characterize young, Jupiter-mass exoplanets. After six years of operation at Gemini South in Chile, the instrument is being upgraded and relocated to Gemini North in Hawaii as GPI 2.0. GPI helped establish that Jovian-mass planets have a higher occurrence rate at smaller separations, motivating several sub-system upgrades to obtain deeper contrasts (up to 20 times improvement to the current limit), particularly at small inner working angles. The key identified science areas for GPI 2.0 are low-mass stars, young nearby stars, solar system objects, planet formation in disks, and planet variability. The necessary instrument changes that will be made to make this possible are to (i) the adaptive optics system, by replacing the current Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (WFS) with a pyramid WFS and a custom EMCCD, (ii) the integral field spectrograph, by employing a new set of prisms to enable an additional broadband (Y-K band) low spectral resolution mode, as well as replacing the pupil viewer camera with a faster, lower noise C-RED2 camera (iii) the calibration interferometer, by upgrading the low-order WFS used for internal alignment and on-sky target tracking with a C-RED2 camera and replacing the calibration high-order WFS used for measuring and correcting non-common path aberrations with a self coherent camera, (iv) the apodized-pupil Lyot coronagraph designs and (v) the software, to enable high-efficiency queue operations at Gemini North. GPI 2.0 is expected to go on-sky in early 2024. Here I will present the key upgrades, the latest timeline for operations, the current status and the new scientific goals.