No Arabic abstract
We revisit one class of z-invariant WaveFront sensor where the LGS is fired aside of the telescope aperture. In this way there is a spatial dependence on the focal plane with respect to the height where the resonant scattering occurs. We revise the basic parameters involving the geometry and we propose various merit functions to define how much improvement can be attained by a z-invariant approach. We show that refractive approaches are not viable and we discuss several solutions involving reflective ones in what has been nicknamed ingot wavefront sensor discussing the degrees of freedom required to keep tracking and the basic recipe for the optical design.
After releasing reference camera solutions in the visible and infrared for natural guide star wavefront sensing with unbeaten performance, we will present the first results of First Light Imaging s C-MORE, the first laser guide star oriented wavefront sensor camera. Within the Opticon WP2 european funded project (INFRAIA 2016-2017, Grant agreement n 730890), which has been set to develop LGS cameras, fast path solutions based on existing sensors had to be explored to provide working-proven cameras to ELT projects ready for the first light schedule. Result of this study, C-MORE is a CMOS based camera with 1600x1100 pixels (9um pitch) and 500 FPS refresh rate. It has been developed to answer most of the needs of future laser based adaptive optics systems (LGS) to be deployed on 20-40m-class telescopes as well as on smaller ones. Using a global shutter architecture, it won t introduce differential temporal errors on the wavefront reconstruction and simplifies the whole command loop. We present the global architecture of the camera, dimensions, weight, interfaces, its main features and measured performance in terms of noise, dark current, quantum efficiency and image quality which are the most important parameters for this application. Because of the very low cost of this solution, this camera can be used also in life-sciences and high end industrial applications, which was also an objective of the Opticon project.
The ingot wavefront sensor (I-WFS) has been proposed, for ELT-like apertures, as a possible pupil plane WFS, to cope with the geometrical characteristics of a laser guide star (LGS). Within the study and development of such a WFS, on-going in the framework of the MAORY project, the final purpose of the I-WFS simulation is to estimate its performance in terms of wavefront aberration measurement capability. The first step of this analysis is to translate incoming wavefronts into the three pupil images, produced by the optical system. The intrinsic geometrical characteristics of the ingot optical element, designed to be coupled with the LGS elongated image, make the system conceptually different with respect to other pupil WFSs (like the Pyramid WFS, P-WFS) also in terms of the simulation technique to be selected, within the ones which can be found in literature. In this paper, we aim to report the considerations and derivations which led to the selection of a ray-tracing method for ingot pupil images simulation, and the geometrical assumptions and approach made to optimize the computing time.
The performance of adaptive optics systems is partially dependant on the algorithms used within the real-time control system to compute wavefront slope measurements. We demonstrate use of a matched filter algorithm for the processing of elongated laser guide star (LGS) Shack-Hartmann images, using the CANARY adaptive optics instrument on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope and the European Southern Observatory Wendelstein LGS Unit placed 40m away. This algorithm has been selected for use with the forthcoming Thirty Meter Telescope, but until now had not been demonstrated on-sky. From the results of a first observing run, we show that the use of matched filtering improves our adaptive optics system performance, with increases in on-sky H-band Strehl measured up to about a factor of 1.1 with respect to a conventional centre of gravity approach. We describe the algorithm used, and the methods that we implemented to enable on-sky demonstration.
The new class of large telescopes, as the future ELT, are designed to work with Laser Guide Star (LGS) tuned to a resonance of atmosphere sodium atoms. This wavefront sensing technique presents complex issues for an application to big telescopes due to many reasons mainly linked to the finite distance of the LGS, the launching angle, Tip-tilt indetermination and focus anisoplanatism. The implementation of a laboratory Prototype for LGS wavefront sensor (WFS) at the beginning of the phase study of MAORY, the Multi-conjugate Adaptive Optics RelaY for the ELT first light, has been indispensable to investigate specific mitigation strategies to the LGS WFS issues. This paper shows the test results of LGS WFS Prototype under different working conditions. The accuracy within which the LGS images are generated on the Shack-Hartmann (SH) WFS has been cross-checked with the MAORY simulation code. The experiments show the effect of noise on the centroiding precision, the impact of LGS image truncation on the wavefront sensing accuracy as well as the temporal evolution of sodium density profile and LGS image under-sampling.
In the present paper, we consider the optical design of a zoom system for the active refocusing in laser guide star wavefront sensors. The system is designed according to the specifications coming from the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT)-HARMONI instrument, the first-light, integral field spectrograph for the European (E)-ELT. The system must provide a refocusing of the laser guide as a function of telescope pointing and large decentring of the incoming beam. The system considers four moving lens groups, each of them being a doublet with one aspherical surface. The advantages and shortcomings of such a solution in terms of the component displacements and complexity of the surfaces are described in detail. It is shown that the system can provide the median value of the residual wavefront error of 13.8-94.3 nm and the maximum value <206 nm, while the exit pupil distortion is 0.26-0.36% for each of the telescope pointing directions.