The next generation of Extremely Large Telescope (ELT, 24 to 39m diameter) will suffer from the so-called ”pupil fragmentation” problem. Due to their large spiders, differential pistons will appear in the wavefront between the part of the pupil separated by the spiders during observations. The Adaptive Optics (AO) system necessary to compensate atmospheric turbulence appears unable to sense this differential piston leading to bad control by the loop. Hence, such differential pistons, a.k.a petal modes, will prevent the AO system from reaching the diffraction limit of the telescope and ultimately will represent the main limitation of AO-assisted observation with an ELT and will be particularly detrimental to High Contrast observation modes. All the future single conjugated AO systems for the ELT have a Pyramid Wavefront Sensor (PyWFS) which can be sensitive to the petal mode if unmodulated. But the current control methods available forces the modulation of the PyWFS to ensure the AO loop stability. In this presentation we study the origin and properties of the petal mode through a simplified pupil. There are two identified sources: the atmospheric turbulence and the Low Wind Effect (LWE). We show how the atmospheric turbulence can be mitigated though minioning and the limit of this mitigation with the origin of the petal flares. Furthermore, the minioning is inefficient at reducing LWE petal. This has led to the necessity of a second sensor dedicated to the petal mode measurement: a petalometer. We finally propose a PyWFS type of petalometer and study its properties and limits for the control of the petal mode.
The Cassiopée project aims to develop the key technologies that will be used to deploy very high-performance Adaptive Optics for future ELTs. The ultimate challenge is to detect earth-like planets and characterize the composition of their atmosphere. For this, imaging contrasts of the order of 10^9 are required, implying a leap forward in adaptive optics performance, with high density deformable mirrors (>100x100 actuators), low-noise cameras and the control of the loop at few kHz. The project brings together 2 industrial partners: First Light Imaging and ALPAO, and 2 academic partners: ONERA and LAM, who will work together to develop a new camera for WFSensing, a new deformable mirror and their implementation in an AO loop.
The Zernike wavefront sensor (ZWFS) stands out as one of the most sensitive optical systems for measuring the phase of an incoming wavefront, reaching photon efficiencies close to the fundamental limit. This quality, combined with the fact that it can easily measure phase discontinuities, has led to its widespread adoption in various wavefront control applications, both on the ground but also for future space-based instruments. Despite its advantages, the ZWFS faces a significant challenge due to its extremely limited dynamic range, making it particularly challenging for ground-based operations. To address this limitation, one approach is to use the ZWFS after a general adaptive optics (AO) system; however, even in this scenario, the dynamic range remains a concern. This paper investigates two optical configurations of the ZWFS: the conventional setup and its phase-shifted counterpart, which generates two distinct images of the telescope pupil. We assess the performance of various reconstruction techniques for both configurations, spanning from traditional linear reconstructors to gradient-descent-based methods. The evaluation encompasses simulations and experimental tests conducted on the Santa cruz Extreme Adaptive optics Lab (SEAL) bench at UCSC. Our findings demonstrate that certain innovative reconstruction techniques introduced in this study significantly enhance the dynamic range of the ZWFS, particularly when utilizing the phase-shifted version.
PAPYRUS is an adaptive optics bench setup on the telescope T152, 1.52m diameter, of Observatoire de Haute Provence (OHP, France) since June 2022. This bench has been designed for research and development in adaptive optics and educational purposes. However it gained in maturity since its first light and is now evolving towards an instrumental platform, including infrared capacities (imager, fiber injection module). So equipped, the bench will mature concepts and techniques coupling adaptive optics and their associated instruments, for future systems such as the 2.5m PROVIDENCE system that will also be located at OHP or for the HARMONI instrument to be installed at ELT. PAPYRUS features a four-sided pyramid in front of an EMCCD camera working in broadband visible and a deformable mirror made of 241 actuators. We review here the current status of the bench, its performances and its on-going developments.
RISTRETTO is an instrument developed by the University of Geneva and the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, designed to characterise temperate rocky planets around M-dwarfs, such as Proxima b, using reflected light. Achieving this requires a contrast of approximately 10−7, necessitating a highly efficient extreme adaptive optics (AO) system. The high performance targeted by the RISTRETTO instrument translates into a very restrictive error budget for the AO system. New error terms that used to be neglected for previous AO systems must be carefully evaluated such as the Chromatic Pupil Shift (CPS). In this proceeding, we introduce the concept of CPS and we propose a method to compute it. Then, we inject this errors into-end to-end simulation to obtain its value. We found that the chromatic shift creates, for a science wavelength of 750nm and a zenith angle of 38°, a wavefront error of 5.24nm RMS at a 1400nm wavefront sensing wavelength and 2.53nm at 925nm. We conclude that the chromatic pupil shift is twice lower than the temporal error for a close-loop at 5kHz with a gain of 0.4 and an one frame delay but is in the order of other lower error terms such as aliasing and we must consider it in RISTRETTO’s error budget.
Fourier Filtering WaveFront Sensors (FFWFS) are extremely sensitive wavefront sensors that will improve the wavefront estimation of large ground-based facilities such as European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) or Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). Yet they suffer from inherent non-linear behaviour that prevents their optimised use. We propose a modification of the calibration process of these sensors to implement their non linearities in the matrix formalism (linear formalism). The new approach called the specific matrix tackles the loss of sensitivity and the modal confusion of the FFWFS. It allows the measurement of the absolute phase and to close the loop using a non-modulated pyramid. We demonstrate this method by use of numerical simulations.
To reach the full potential of the new generation of ground based telescopes, an extremely fine adjustment of the phase is required. Wavefront control and correction before detection has therefore become one of the cornerstones of instruments to achieve targeted performance, especially for high-contrast imaging. A crucial feature of accurate wavefront control leans on the wavefront sensor (WFS). We present a strategy to design new Fourier-Filtering WFS that encode the phase close from the fundamental photon efficiency limit. This strategy seems promising as it generates highly sensitive sensors suited for different pupil shape configurations.
The next generation of Extremely Large Telescope (24 to 39m diameter) will suffer from the so-called ”pupil fragmentation” problem. Due to their pupil shape complexity (segmentation, large spiders...), some differential pistons may appear between some isolated part of the full pupil during the observations. Although classical AO system will be able to correct for turbulence effects, they will be blind to this specific telescope induced perturbations. Hence, such differential piston, a.k.a petal modes, will prevent to reach the diffraction limit of the telescope and ultimately will represent the main limitation of AO-assisted observation with an ELT. In this work we analyse the spatial structure of these petal modes and how it affects the ability of a Pyramid Wavefront sensor to sense them. Then we propose a variation around the classical Pyramid concept for increasing the WFS sensitivity to this particular modes. Nevertheless, We show that one single WFS can not accurately and simultaneously measure turbulence and petal modes. We propose a double path wavefront sensor scheme to solve this problem. We show that such a scheme, associated to a spatial filtering of residual turbulence in the second WFS path dedicated to petal mode sensing, allows to fully measure and correct for both turbulence and fragmentation effects and will eventually restore the full capability and spatial resolution of the future ELT.
The next generation of Giant Fragmented Telescopes will allow the study of faint and distant objects such as exoplanets. But the structure of the telescope also brings new challenges such as pupil fragmentation or Low- Wind Effect (LWE) that needs to be corrected by the Adaptive Optics (AO) system. The Wave-Front Sensor (WFS) which is the heart of the AO system needs to be able to measure these aberrations. Because of its high sensitivity, the Zernike Wave-Front Sensor (ZWFS) appears to be a viable candidate as a 2nd stage instrument to measure telescope seeing or differential piston. However, its use is limited by its small dynamic range. We propose here a new concept of WFS based on the ZWFS with a better dynamic range : the Phase Shifted ZWFS (Phase-Shifted ZWFS).
The Extremely Large Telescope [ELT] is the future large European optical observatory. It will offer to astronomical community a unique high angular resolution of 12 mas in K band. The diffraction limit on such a telescope can only be met by using adaptive optics systems in order to compensate for the atmospheric perturbations as well as the telescope and instrument aberrations.
The large spiders (50cm width) of the telescope are the source of strong wave-front fragmentation that prevent from reaching the diffraction limit. Among them, the low wind effect is a large expected wave-front discontinuity brought by the temperature gradient around the spiders.
In this paper, we analyse the expected impact of such an aberration on the performance of the AO system, in the case of a first generation SCAO system on ELT. We also analyse its impact on the AO WFS. Lastly, we explore possible solution for HARMONI-SCAO and analyse their potential performance.
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