Director of Research and leader of the Optical Turbulence research group of the INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Florence (Italy) since 2006. PhD in Astronomy and High Angular Resolution on 1998 at Laboratoire d'Astrophysique - Universite de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Nice (France). Previous positions at Instituto de Astronomia - Universidad Nacional Autonama de Mexico on 1999-2002 and at Max-Planck Institute fur Astronomie, Heidelberg (Germany) on 2002-2005. Expert in turbulence applied to the ground-based astronomy (hydrodynamical code and instrumentation for turbulence characterization). Expertise in extrasolar planets, high contrast imaging and jets from young sources objects.
On 2005 she has been awarded by the European Community a Marie Curie Excellence Grant to set-up in Arcetri an independent research group working on the optical turbulence characterization and forecast in application to the ground-based astronomy (ForOT, 2006-2010). 2011-2015: PI of the MOSE project, a feasibility study funded by ESO aiming at evaluate the opportunity to implement a system for the optical turbulence forecast at the site of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). 2015-2020: PI of the ALTA project aiming at implement and running an automatic system for the forecast of the optical turbulence at the site of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). 25 papers as first author on peer-reviewed journals; 38 papers as first and second author published on peer-reviewed journals.
On 2005 she has been awarded by the European Community a Marie Curie Excellence Grant to set-up in Arcetri an independent research group working on the optical turbulence characterization and forecast in application to the ground-based astronomy (ForOT, 2006-2010). 2011-2015: PI of the MOSE project, a feasibility study funded by ESO aiming at evaluate the opportunity to implement a system for the optical turbulence forecast at the site of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). 2015-2020: PI of the ALTA project aiming at implement and running an automatic system for the forecast of the optical turbulence at the site of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). 25 papers as first author on peer-reviewed journals; 38 papers as first and second author published on peer-reviewed journals.
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FATE: an operational automatic system for optical turbulence forecasting at the Very Large Telescope
We analyze some restrictions found in the estimation process, which are general to any measurement technique. The insensitivity of the instrument to large values of outer scale is one of them, as the telescope becomes blind to outer scales larger than its diameter. Another problem is the contradiction between the length of data and the stationarity assumption of the turbulence (turbulence parameters may change during the data acquisition time).
Our method effectively deals with problems such as noise estimation, asymmetric correlation functions and wavefront propagation effects. It is shown that the latter cannot be neglected in high resolution AO systems or strong turbulence at high altitudes. The method is applied to the Gemini South MCAO system (GeMS) that comprises five wavefront sensors and two DMs. Statistical values of L0(h) at Cerro Pachón from data acquired with GeMS during three years are shown, where some interesting resemblance to other independent results in the literature are shown.
Contrast limits with the Simultaneous Differential Extrasolar Planet Imager (SDI) at the VLT and MMT
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