The ISSP team

 
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Denis Mourard 
I'm the PI and conductor of the ISSP project. As PI of the SPICA instrument installed on the CHARA Array at Mount Wilson, I'm also strongly involved in any of the technical developments we are doing for improving the performance and the quality of the data. Part of my activities is dedicated to the operation of the fringe tracker (for  enabling longer exposure  time) and on the adaptive optics systems together with the CHARA team (to enable the access to fainter targets). We are also currently working on improving the sensitivity by adding the correction of atmospheric refraction before the injection in the SPICA single mode fibers. On the data side, I'm working closely with the team for improving the reliability of our management tools (pipeline, database management). On the astrophysical aspects, I'm now leading the S01 subprogram on the exoplanet host stars. A new vision of the stellar parameters on these stars will permit unprecedented results on the planets themselves, when combining the interferometric measurements with photometric or spectroscopic follow up of such systems. As conductor of the project, I'm of course following all the different programs of the team.

 
Thesis
As a research engineer, I have contributed to several major international programs led by ESA, NASA, CNES, and ESO, including SoHO, COROT, Kepler, PICARD, and VLTI/MATISSE, focusing on solar and stellar physics. Since 2021, as a member of the ERC-funded ISSP survey team, I have been responsible for managing the entire SPICA data processing workflow, from metadata to L0, L1, and L2 levels. This survey is based on the SPICA-DB catalog, which contains all the necessary information about the stars to be observed. This catalog is at the heart of the two main graphical interfaces developed for the ISSP survey: the Night Scheduling Software (NSS), which is used to prepare the interferometric observations with the CHARA array, and the Data Feeding and Querying Software (DFQS) designed to manage the survey, while updating the SPICA-DB catalog accordingly. These tools, built in Python, are linked to those developed at the Jean-Marie Mariotti Center (JMMC) through the interoperability of VO tables. Moreover, the data workflow for the collected observations is automated within the end-of-night procedures, including the archiving of the SPICA data in the Optical interferometry Database (OiDb). Several other catalogs are associated with SPICA and are updated with new observations, such as the follow-up of the ISSP survey and the scientific catalogs, all of which are essential for the overall management of the project. I am also working closely with the scientific team on the implementation of new functionalities in the existing Python tools, as well as with the Pôle SNO Numérique at OCA to develop a new web service to manage the SPICA/ISSP survey.

Mathieu Vrard

Thesis
Asteroseismology is the study of the waves going through stars, allowing to decipher the interiors of stars. The wave frequencies indeed depends on the internal structure of stars therefore bringing to the surface informations on their interiors. This technique can also be used to determine the global characteristics of the stars like their mass and radius. In this project, I am responsible of the task S02 (main-sequence stars) and S03 (subgiant and red giant stars) which concerns low-mass asteroseismic target analysis. The objective is to offer a comparison between the interferometric data, able to obtain stellar angular diameters thus stellar radius with an estimation of the parallaxe, and asteroseismic data. The objective is to strengthen the radius determination we can obtain by asteroseismology and other photometric techniques and to assess the potential of interferometry in the improvement of stellar modelisation, therefore on the extraction of the stellar parameters.

The ISSP survey is managed with co-investigators considered as associate experts: Orlagh CREEVEY, Sebastien DEHEUVELS, Nicolas NARDETTO, Armando DOMICIANO, Markus WITTKOWSKI, and Karine PERRAUT

Direct collaborators

The CHARA group at Mount Wilson and Atlanta: Doug, Gail, Theo, Narsi, Nils, Chris, Nic, Rob, Karolina, Craig, Victor, Norm, Olli, Becky.

The SPICA group at OCA: Philippe, Julien, Christophe, Daniel, Fred, Alain, Isabelle and past members (Sylvain, Fatmé, Stéphane)

The JMMC group at OSUG, with a special tag for Guillaume and Laurent 

Past members

 Pierre Geneslay
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