Enhanced high-dispersion coronagraphy with KPIC phase II: design, assembly and status of sub-modules

The Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) is a purpose-built instrument for high-dispersion coronagraphy in the K and L bands on Keck. This instrument will provide the first high resolution (R>30,000) spectra of known directly imaged exoplanets and low-mass brown dwarf companions visible in the northern hemisphere. KPIC is developed in phases. Phase I is currently at Keck in the early operations stage, and the phase II upgrade will deploy in late 2021. The goal of phase II is to maximize the throughput for planet light and minimize the stellar leakage, hence reducing the exposure time needed to acquire spectra with a given signal-to- noise ratio. To achieve this, KPIC phase II exploits several innovative technologies that have not been combined this way before. These include a 1000-element deformable mirror for wavefront correction and speckle control, a set of lossless beam shaping optics to maximize coupling into the fiber, a pupil apodizer to suppress unwanted starlight, a pupil plane vortex mask to enable the acquisition of spectra at and within the diffraction limit, and an atmospheric dispersion compensator. These modules, when combined with the active fiber injection unit present in phase I, will make for a highly efficient exoplanet characterization platform. In this paper, we will present the final design of the optics and opto-mechanics and highlight some innovative solutions we implemented to facilitate all the new capabilities. We will provide an overview of the assembly and laboratory testing of the sub-modules and some of the results. Finally, we will outline the deployment timeline.