Instrumentation

Ultraviolet Spectroscopy

On the launch pad next to space shuttle Atlantis

The canister for HST servicing mission 4 ready to be loaded into the shuttle

I am the Project Scientist for the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), a sensitive UV spectrograph that was installed on the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. COS is in science operations for over a year. During that time, it has observed the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets, probed accretion and outflows on stellar and galactic scales, and increased the observed path length through the local intergalactic medium by an order of magnitude.

Links:

Cosmic Origins Spectrograph CU page

Review talk from the HST3 Conference, October 2010

I am now the PI of NUIT, a proposed suborbital balloon project to use a narrowband, high spatial resolution NUV imaging telescope to study the links between star formation and galactic feedback in a variety of galaxies.

Optical Spectroscopy

I was also the PI for a CU conceptual design study for HROS, a high-resolution optical spectrograph concept for the Thirty Meter Telescope project. We developed a novel concept for high resolution optical spectroscopy on large aperture telescopes by replacing the canonical cross-dispersed spectrograph with a dichroic tree to spectrally separate the light, feeding a bank of replicated 1st order spectrographs. I am currently pursuing bench tests to demonstrate the feasibility of the dichroic tree and the fiber pseudo-slit, with the long-term goal of developing a design for a single-target or multi-object high resolution spectrograph for the next generation of extremely large telescopes.

Another project that sprang out of this study was an interest in precision spectroscopy. I am part of an effort, lead by Steven Osterman, to develop optical and NIR astronomical laser combs to support radial velocity planet searches. The first NIR laser comb was successfully deployed at the HET in the summer of 2010. We are now pursuing options to combine the comb with a stable NIR spectrograph to begin a survey to search for Earth-mass planets around low-mass stars.

Links:

Thirty Meter Telescope

SPIE Summary of CU-HROS concept

Near-Infrared Imaging and Spectroscopy

In 2003 - 2005, I participated in construction and commissioning of NIC-FPS and NIR imager and Fabry-Perot spectrograph for Apache Point Observatory.

NIC-FPS

As a graduate student, I participated in the construction and commissioning of CoolSpec, a NIR spectrograph for McDonald Observatory.

CoolSpec