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.
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.
HARMONI is the first light visible and near-IR integral field spectrograph 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 (AO) modes - SCAO (including a High Contrast capability) and LTAO - or with NOAO. The project is preparing for Final Design Reviews.
The SCAO system for HARMONI is based on a pyramid wavefront sensor (PWFS) operating in the visible (700 – 1000 nm). Previous implementations on very large telescopes have demonstrated the challenges associated with optimising PWFS performance on-sky, particularly when operated at visible wavelengths. ELT operation will pose further challenges for AO systems, particularly related to the segmentation of the telescope and the control of badly seen ‘petal modes’. In this paper we investigate these challenges in the context of the HARMONI SCAO system. We present the results of end-to-end simulations of our baseline approach, using a coupled control basis to avoid the runaway development of petal modes in the control loop. The impact of key parameters are investigated and methods for optical gain compensation and optimisation of the control basis are presented. We discuss recent updates to the control algorithms and demonstrate the possibility of improving performance using a form of super resolution. Finally, we report on the expected performance across a range of conditions.
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.
“Super-resolution” (SR) refers to a combination of optical design and signal processing techniques jointly employed to obtain reconstructed wave-fronts at a higher-resolution from multiple low-resolution samples, overcoming the inherent limitations of the latter.
After compelling performance gain obtained both in simulations and on-sky [presented at this conference] using Shack-Hartmann wave-front sensors (WFS) with laser guide-stars, we broaden its application domain to pyramid (P-)WFS.
We revisit the analytic P-WFS diffraction model to show the “what, how, when and why” SR can be employed, evaluating its gains under turbulent and non-turbulent (e.g. pupil fragmentation) conditions.
Results: We show that a super-resolved P-WFS is more resilient to mis-registration, lifts alignment requirements and improves performance (against alialiasing and other spurious modes AOsystems are poorly sensitive to) with only a factor up to 2 increased computational burden.
The Provence Adaptive optics Pyramid Run System (PAPYRUS) is a pyramid-based Adaptive Optics (AO) system that will be installed at the Coude focus of the 1.52m telescope (T152) at the Observatoire de Haute Provence (OHP). The project is being developed by PhD students and Postdocs across France with support from staff members consolidating the existing expertise and hardware into an RD testbed. This testbed allows us to run various pyramid wavefront sensing (WFS) control algorithms on-sky and experiment on new concepts for wavefront control with additional benefit from the high number of available nights at this telescope. It will also function as a teaching tool for students during the planned AO summer school at OHP. To our knowledge, this is one of the first pedagogic pyramid-based AO systems on-sky. The key components of PAPYRUS are a 17x17 actuators Alpao deformable mirror with a Alpao RTC, a very low noise camera OCAM2k, and a 4-faces glass pyramid. PAPYRUS is designed in order to be a simple and modular system to explore wavefront control with a pyramid WFS on sky. We present an overview of PAPYRUS, a description of the opto-mechanical design and the current status of the project.
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