But there is another way to overcome these obstacles. In her laboratory among the redwoods, Jensen-Clem and her students experiment with new technologies and software to more clearly see Keck’s primary honeycomb mirror and its smaller, “deformable” mirror. Using measurements from atmospheric sensors, deformable mirrors have been designed to quickly adjust their shape so they can correct for distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere during flight.
This common imaging technique, called adaptive optics, has been a common practice since the 1990s. But Jensen-Clem wants to take the game to the next level with extremely adaptive optical technologies, which aim to create the highest image quality over a small field of view. Her group does this in particular by tackling issues related to wind or the main mirror itself. The goal is to focus the starlight so precisely that a planet can be visible even if the host star is a million to a billion times brighter.
In April, she and her former collaborator Maaike van Kooten were named co-recipients of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation’s New Horizons in Physics Prize. The award announcement states that they earned this early career research award for their potential “to enable the direct detection of the smallest exoplanets” through a repertoire of methods that the two women have developed throughout their careers.
In July, Jensen-Clem was also announced as a member of a new committee for the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a concept for a NASA space telescope that would spend its career searching for signs of life in the universe. She is tasked with defining the mission’s scientific objectives by the end of this decade.
ETHAN TWEEDIE
“In adaptive optics, we spend a lot of time in simulations or in the laboratory,” says Jensen-Clem. “It’s been a long road to see that I’ve actually improved things at the observatory over the last few years.”
Jensen-Clem has long appreciated astronomy for its more mind-boggling qualities. In seventh grade, she became fascinated with how time slows down near a black hole when her father, an aerospace engineer, explained that concept to her. After starting her undergraduate studies at MIT in 2008, she became fascinated by the way a distant star can appear to disappear—blinking out suddenly or fading gently, depending on the type of object moving in front of it. “It wasn’t really exoplanet science, but there was a lot of overlap,” she says.
“If you just look at the night sky and see stars twinkling, it goes fast. So we have to go fast too.”
During this time, Jensen-Clem began sowing the seeds for one of her award-winning methods after her teaching assistant recommended she apply for an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There she worked on a setup that could perfect the orientation of a large mirror. Such mirrors are more difficult to realign than the smaller, deformable mirrors, whose shape-changing segments respond to Earth’s fluctuating atmosphere.
“At the time, we said, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be really cool to install one of these at the Keck Observatory?'” says Jensen-Clem. The idea stuck. She even wrote about it in a grant application as she was getting ready to start her graduate work at Caltech. And after years of touch-and-go development, Jensen-Clem succeeded about a year ago in developing the system, which uses installing a technology called a Zernike wavefront sensor on Keck’s primary mirror. “My work as an intern is finally over,” she says.
