Rise of the machines: first year operations of the Robo-AO visible-light laser-adaptive optics instrument

Abstract

Robo-AO is the first autonomous laser adaptive optics system and science instrument operating on sky. With minimal human oversight, the system robotically executes large scale surveys, monitors long-term astrophysical dynamics and characterizes newly discovered transients, all at the visible diffraction limit. The average target-to target operational overhead, including slew time, is a mere 86 s, enabling up to ~20 observations per hour. The first of many envisioned systems went live in June 2012, and has since finished 78 nights of science observing at the Palomar Observatory 60-inch (1.5 m) telescope, with over 9,000 robotic observations executed as of August 2013. The system will be augmented in 2014 with a low-noise wide field infrared camera, which will double as a tip-tilt sensor, to widen the spectral bandwidth of observations, increase available sky coverage as well as enable deeper visible imaging using adaptive-optics sharpened infrared tip-tilt guide sources.