First Light Adaptive Optics System for Large Binocular Telescope
The paper describes the design of the single conjugate Adaptive Optics system to be installed on the LBT telescope. This system will be located in the Acquisition, Guiding and Wavefront sensor unit (AGW) mounted at the front bent Gregorian focus of LBT. Two innovative key features of this system are the Adaptive Secondary Mirror and the Pyramid Wavefront Sensor. The secondary provides 672 actuators wavefront correction available at the various foci of LBT. Due to the adaptive secondary mirror there is no need to optically conjugate the pupil on the deformable mirror. This allows having a very short sensor optical path made up using small dimension refractive optics. The overall AO system has a transmission of 70 % and fits in a rectangle of about 400x320mm. The pyramid sensor allows having different pupil sampling using on-chip binning of the detector. Main pupil samplings for the LBT system are 30x30, 15x15 and 10x10. Reference star acquisition is obtained moving the wavefront sensor unit in a field of view of 3x2 arcmin. Computer simulations of the overall system performance show the good correction achievable in J, H, and K. In particular, in our configuration, the limiting magnitude of pyramid sensor results more than one magnitude fainter with respect to ShackHartmann sensor. This feature directly translates in an increased sky coverage that is, in K band, about doubled with respect to the same AO system using a Shack-Hartmann sensor.
LBT adaptive secondary electronics
The adaptive secondary mirror is a fundamental part in the LBT adaptive optics architecture. The thin, continuous mirror is controlled by 672 electromagnetic actuators (voice coil motors) with local position feedback (capacitive sensor) and allows to perform from tip-tilt to high order wavefront correction, but also chopping. The adaptive secondary is controlled by a DSP-based dedicated electronics. The control electronics does not only implement the mirror position control tasks, but does also realize the Real Time Reconstructor (RTR). The control system, while maintaining a similar architecture to the MMT adaptive secondary one, shows a substantial enhancement in terms of computational power, rising in the range of hundreds of Gigaflops. This allows to minimize the computational time required to apply the wavefront correction pattern from the wavefront sensor acquisition, even in case of high order reconstructor dynamics. The electronics is housed in compact cooled crates placed in the adaptive secondary hub. Apart from the power supply lines, it is connected to the other components of the adaptive control system just through a very high speed fiber optic link, capable of 2.9 Gigabit/s of actual data throughput. The control system has been designed according to modular concept, so that the number of channels can be easily increased or reduced for adapting the electronics to different correctors. A substantial effort has been dedicated to the flexibility and on-field configurability of system. In this frame, the same electronics (or part of it) can be easily adapted to become the building block for the data processing unit required for Multi-Conjugated Adaptive Optics
Adaptive secondary mirror for the 6.5-m conversion of the Multiple Mirror Telescope: latest laboratory test results of the P36 prototype
The 336-actuator adaptive secondary unit (MMT336) for the new MMT is being assembled in Italy and will be delivered in June 2000 for the acceptance test at Steward Observatory (Tucson, AZ). The latest results obtained on a reduced-size (36 actuators) prototype called P36 are reported, confirming a settling time less than 1 ms measured in previous tests. The flattening procedure has been successfully tested on the P36 unit, reducing the initial surface error of 1.1 micrometer down to 43 nm rms. Moreover the dynamical tests on the P36 unit show that the system is able to attenuate the atmospheric-induced error from 466 nm to 31 nm rms. This in the case of median seeing condition at MMT (0.75 arcsec) a high wind speed (48 m/s) and a 1 kHz command rate per actuator. Finally, in the same conditions the atmospheric error is effectively attenuated up to a frequency of 100 Hz (OdB attenuation level).