Before the official meeting began, almost a
dozen participants visited the optical labs
of the Center for Adaptive Optics at the University of California Santa Cruz, where they
had the opportunity to witness the current advanced status of the Gemini Planet
Imager (GPI), a next-generation exoplanetfinding instrument.
Meeting Highlights:
Gemini’s Incoming Director, Markus KisslerPatig opened the meeting by sharing some
of his ideas for the future of Gemini, including both “tactical” and “strategic” plans for
instrumentation, as well as his visions for expanded flexibility in operations.
“In the next decade during which Atacama
Large Millimeter Array, James Webb Space
Telescope, and large surveys will play a dominant role, we intend to fully capitalize on
Gemini’s strengths,” said Kissler-Patig. “We
will make Gemini a very flexible and nimble
observatory, responding quickly to our users’ needs.” Many participants were particularly interested in his proposal for a new observing time allocation model via a fast peer
review, rather than the comparatively slow
Time Allocation Committee, process.
Day 1: Science
As the link below illustrates, the science content at this meeting was as varied as the participants. The Scientific Organizing Committee (SOC) carefully considered how to craft
a program with enough depth to attract
specialists in particular areas and enough
breadth to interest a majority of Gemini users. With some schedule juggling, the meeting’s organizers accommodated all requests
for contributed talks. (A full list of talks presented in the three-day event can be reviewed at http://www.gemini.edu/program.)
December2012
The first session of day one focused on exoplanets and stars, with invited talks by Christian Marois (National Research Council of Canada) and Michael Liu (University of Hawai‘i)
discussing Gemini’s past highlights in direct
imaging and surveys for extrasolar planets.
Bruce MacIntosh (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) also gave an invited talk
about upcoming work with GPI, which will
soon enable Gemini users to take advantage
of its advanced coronagraph, very-highorder adaptive optics, precision wavefront
sensing, and near-infrared integral-field
spectrograph, for exoplanet research. Contributed talks on this first day covered topics
from young-star disks to final flash stars and
diffuse interstellar bands. Mid-infrared observations were a recurring theme in many
of these talks. Gemini staff member Sandra
Leggett’s invited talk on brown dwarfs with
“nano-solar-luminosities,” completed the
packed day.
Day 2: Science, Instruments, and
Looking Ahead
Gemini’s own Chad Trujillo kicked off day
two with an invited talk on Gemini observations of ices on small Solar System bodies.
Chad shared that both Kuiper Belt Objects
and Main Belt Comets may have retained
ices from the planet-forming epoch of our
Solar System, despite their very different
thermal histories, dynamical histories, and
heliocentric distances.
Additional science topics on day two focused on high-resolution spectroscopy at
Gemini — a good match for the discussions
of instrumentation which filled the middle
of the day’s agenda.
Of particular note, Nobuo Arimoto and
Masahiro Takada (Subaru Observatory) discussed their observatory’s plans for future
instrumentation, and Eder Martioli, Ricardo
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