Deployment of focal plane WFS technologies on 8-m telescopes: from the Subaru SPIDERS pathfinder, to the facility-class GPI 2.0 CAL2 system

Facility-class high-contrast exoplanet imaging systems are currently limited by non-common path quasi-static speckles. Due to these aberrations, the raw contrast saturates after a few seconds. Several active wavefront correction techniques have been developed to remove this noise, with limited success. The NRC Canada is funding two projects, the SPIDERS pathfinder at the Subaru telescope (ETA 2023), and the CAL2 upgrade of the Gemini Planet Imager-2 (ETA 2024), to deploy a modified self-coherent camera (based on FAST) to measure the focal plane electric field, and to apply wavefront corrections in a closed-loop down to 10s of ms in a narrow band. The CAL2 project will focus on developing a facility-class focal plane & Lyot-stop Low-order sensors using a CRED2 and a SAPHIRA-based camera, reaching up to a gain of 100x in contrast for bright stars. The SPIDERS pathfinder will have a similar configuration with the addition of an imaging Fourier transform spectrograph, allowing the acquisition of a 3.3” diagonal FOV to up to R-20,000 in the NIR to perform advanced spectral differential imaging at a high-spectral resolution to search and characterize exoplanets. These projects will serve as the foundation to develop similar systems for future ground-/space-based telescopes, and be an important step toward the development of instruments to search for life signatures in the atmosphere of exoplanets.