that measures and corrects for atmospheric
turbulence a thousand times per second. Early studies for the GPI project were spearheaded by the University of California’s Center for
Adaptive Optics, with funding from the National Science Foundation. Donald Gavel, at
Lick Observatory UC Santa Cruz, led laboratory research efforts that proved the micromirror and coronagraph technologies. Scientists
at the American Museum of Natural History,
led by Ben Oppenheimer (who also led a project demonstrating some of the same technologies used in GPI on the 5-meter Palomar
project) designed special masks that are part
of the instrument’s coronagraph which blocks
the bright starlight that can obscure faint
planets. Engineer Kent Wallace and a team
from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory constructed an ultra-precise infrared wavefront
sensor to measure small distortions in starlight that might mask a planet. A team at the
University of Califo ɹ