Extremely Large Telescope

Abstract:

Laser Guide Star [LGS] wave-front sensing is a key element of the Laser Tomographic AO system and mainly drives the final performance of any ground based high resolution instrument. In that framework, HARMONI the first light spectro-imager of the ELT [1,2], will use 6 Laser focused around 90km(@Zenith) with a circular geometry in order to sense, reconstruct and correct for the turbulence volume located above the telescope. LGS wave-front sensing suffers from several well-known limitations [3] which are exacerbated by the giant size of the Extremely Large Telescopes. In that context, the presentation is threefold: (1) we will describe, quantify and analyse the various effects (bias and noise) induced by the LGS WFS in the context of ELT. Among other points, we will focus on the spurious low order signal generated by the spatially and temporally variable sodium layer. (2) we will propose a global design trade-off for the LGS WFS and Tomographic reconstruction process in the HARMONI context. We will show that, under strong technical constraints (especially concerning the detectors characteristics), a mix of opto-mechanic and numerical optimisations will allow to get rid of WFS bias induce by spot elongation without degrading the ultimate system performance (3) beyond HARMONI baseline, we will briefly present alternative strategies (from components, concepts and algorithms point of view) that could solve the LGS spot elongation issues at lower costs and better robustness.

Abstract:

© 2019 AO4ELT 2019 - Proceedings 6th Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes. All rights reserved. Laser Guide Star [LGS] wave-front sensing is a key element of the Laser Tomographic AO system and mainly drives the final performance of any ground based high resolution instrument. In that framework, HARMONI the first light spectro-imager of the ELT [1,2], will use 6 Laser focused around 90km(@Zenith) with a circular geometry in order to sense, reconstruct and correct for the turbulence volume located above the telescope. LGS wave-front sensing suffers from several well-known limitations [3] which are exacerbated by the giant size of the Extremely Large Telescopes. In that context, the presentation is threefold: (1) we will describe, quantify and analyse the various effects (bias and noise) induced by the LGS WFS in the context of ELT. Among other points, we will focus on the spurious low order signal generated by the spatially and temporally variable sodium layer. (2) we will propose a global design trade-off for the LGS WFS and Tomographic reconstruction process in the HARMONI context. We will show that, under strong technical constraints (especially concerning the detectors characteristics), a mix of opto-mechanic and numerical optimisations will allow to get rid of WFS bias induce by spot elongation without degrading the ultimate system performance (3) beyond HARMONI baseline, we will briefly present alternative strategies (from components, concepts and algorithms point of view) that could solve the LGS spot elongation issues at lower costs and better robustness.

Abstract:

Current designs for all three extremely large telescopes show the overwhelming adoption of the pyramid wavefront sensor (P-WFS) as the WFS of choice for adaptive optics (AO) systems sensing on natural guide stars (NGS) or extended objects. The key advantages of the P-WFS over the Shack-Hartmann are known and are mainly provided by the improved sensitivity (fainter NGS) and reduced sensitivity to spatial aliasing. However, robustness and tolerances of the P-WFS for the ELTs are not currently well understood. In this paper, we present simulation results for the single-conjugate AO mode of HARMONI, a visible and near-infrared integral field spectrograph for the European Extremely Large Telescope. We first explore the wavefront sensing issues related to the telescope itself; namely the island effect (i.e. differential piston) and M1 segments phasing errors. We present mitigation strategies to the island effect and their performance. We then focus on some performance optimisation aspects of the AO design to explore the impact of the RTC latency and the optical gain issues, which will in particular affect the high-contrast mode of HARMONI. Finally, we investigate the influence of the quality of glass pyramid prism itself, and of optical aberrations on the final AO performance. By relaxing the tolerances on the fabrication of the prism, we are able to reduce hardware costs and simplify integration. We show the importance of calibration (i.e. updating the control matrix) to capture any displacement of the telescope pupil and rotation of the support structure for M4. We also show the importance of the number of pixels used for wavefront sensing to relax tolerances of the pyramid prism. Finally, we present a detailed optical design of the pyramid prism, central element of the P-WFS.