Baldr: a Zernike wavefront sensor for VLTI/Asgard

Benjamin Courtney-Barrer; Gordon Robertson; Adam Taras; Julien Tom Bernard; Grace McGuinness; Fred Crous; Peter Tuthill; Mamadou N'Diaye; Connor Langford; Nick Cvetojevic; Denis Defrère; Stefan Kraus; Frantz Martinache; Marc-Antoine Martinod; Michael Ireland

doi:10.1117/12.3016212

27 August 2024 Baldr: a Zernike wavefront sensor for VLTI/Asgard

Benjamin Courtney-Barrer, Gordon Robertson, Adam Taras, Julien Tom Bernard, Grace McGuinness, Fred Crous, Peter Tuthill, Mamadou N'Diaye, Connor Langford, Nick Cvetojevic, Denis Defrère, Stefan Kraus, Frantz Martinache, Marc-Antoine Martinod, Michael Ireland

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 13097, Adaptive Optics Systems IX; 130971O (2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3016212
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2024, Yokohama, Japan

Abstract

The simultaneous push to unprecedented contrast, spectral and spatial resolution at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), as promised by the Asgard instrument suite, requires unprecedented high Strehl ratios and phase-front stability. This will be the job of Baldr: a new J or H band Zernike wavefront sensor (ZWFS) used as a second stage adaptive optics (AO) system for the VLTI/Asgard instrument suite. ZWFS was selected for Baldr due to its optimal photon sensitivity and the need for Baldr to be extremely low latency to reduce the residuals from the first stage AO systems. Here we briefly present the design of Baldr which uses a novel architecture where all four Baldr beams for adaptive optics from each telescope are sensed with a low-latency C-RED One detector, permitting AO frame rates up to 3.5kHz. With this architecture simulations show that the Baldr design can deliver J-band Strehl ratios for the 1.8m Auxiliary Telescopes (AT’s) of over 80%, which is a significant improvement on the Strehl ratios otherwise delivered to Asgard, which would limit the scientific objectives of the instrument. Finally we present preliminary test-bed results and give an overview of progress and future work.

Conference Presentation

(2024) Published by SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Citation Download Citation

Benjamin Courtney-Barrer, Gordon Robertson, Adam Taras, Julien Tom Bernard, Grace McGuinness, Fred Crous, Peter Tuthill, Mamadou N'Diaye, Connor Langford, Nick Cvetojevic, Denis Defrère, Stefan Kraus, Frantz Martinache, Marc-Antoine Martinod, and Michael Ireland "Baldr: a Zernike wavefront sensor for VLTI/Asgard", Proc. SPIE 13097, Adaptive Optics Systems IX, 130971O (27 August 2024); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3016212

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