ELT-HARMONI is the first light visible and near-IR integral field spectrograph (IFS) for the ELT. It covers a large spectral range from 450nm to 2450nm with resolving powers from 3500 to 18000 and spatial sampling from 60mas to 4mas. It can operate in two Adaptive Optics modes - SCAO (including a High Contrast capability) and LTAO - or with NOAO. The project is preparing for Final Design Reviews.
The High Contrast Module (HCM) will allow HARMONI to perform direct imaging and spectral analysis of exoplanets up to 106 times fainter than their host star. Quasi-static aberrations are a limiting factor and must be calibrated as close as possible to the focal plane masks to reach the specified contrast. A Zernike sensor for Extremely Low-level Differential Aberrations (ZELDA) will be used in real-time and closed-loop operation at 0.1Hz frequency for this purpose. Unlike a Shack-Hartmann, the ZELDA wavefront sensor is sensitive to Island and low-wind effects. The ZELDA sensor has already been tested on VLT-SPHERE1 and will be used in other instruments. Our objective is to adapt this sensor to the specific case of HARMONI.
A ZELDA prototype is being both simulated and experimentally tested at IPAG. Its nanometric precision has first been checked in 2020 in the case of slowly evolving, small wavefront errors, and without dispersion nor turbulence residuals. On this experimental basis, we address the performance of the sensor under realistic operational conditions including residuals, mis-centring, dispersion, sensitivity, etc. Atmospheric refraction residuals were introduced by the use of a prism, and turbulence was introduced by a spatial light modulator which is also used to minimise wavefront residuals in a closed loop in the observing conditions expected with HARMONI.Segmented mirrors are widely used today in diverse domains: fiber coupling, laser beam shaping, microscopy or retina imaging. If, these mirrors offer a solution to realize important monolithic sizes for giant telescopes in astronomy, they also raise the problem of segments cophasing and measurement of phase discontinuities. In this work, we aim to investigate a suitable WFS approach for pupil phase discontinuity measurement. Coupling a segmented PTT mirror (Iris AO) with four different WFS (Shack-Hartmann, Quadriwave Lateral Shearing Interferometer, Pyramid and Zernike Phase Mask), we study their sensitivity to segmented pupil: in particular, segment phasing, stability, saturation, flat, or still the addressing mode are then performed and compared.
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