This will count as one of your downloads.
You will have access to both the presentation and article (if available).
• the size of the telescope and the associated complexity of the wavefront control tasks
• the unique scientific capabilities of METIS, including high contrast imaging
• the interaction with the newly established, integrated wavefront control infrastructure of the ELT
• the integration of the near-infrared Pyramid Wavefront Sensor and other key Adaptive Optics (AO) hardware embedded within a large, fully cryogenic instrument.
METIS and it’s AO system have passed the final design review and are now in the manufacturing, assembly, integration and testing phase. The firsts are approached through a compact hard- and software design and an extensive test program to mature METIS SCAO before it is deployed at the telescope. This program includes significant investments in test setups that allow to mimic conditions at the ELT. A dedicated cryo-test facility allows for subsystem testing independent of the METIS infrastructure. A telescope simulator is being set up for end-to-end laboratory tests of the AO control system together with the final SCAO hardware. Specific control algorithm prototypes will be tested on sky. In this contribution, we present the progress of METIS SCAO with an emphasis on the preparation for the test activities foreseen to enable a successful future deployment of METIS SCAO at the ELT.
METIS is the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) 1st-generation Mid-Infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph. It will offer spectroscopic, imaging and coronagraphic capabilities from 3 up to 13 microns with Adaptive-Optics correction.
With its Final Design Review due late 2022 we report on the wavefront control strategy devised to meet the METIS science and technological requirements. Such strategy addresses challenging aspects as i) the appearance of differential petal piston modes in the presence of secondary mirror support struts caused either by numerical processing or the actual, physical low-wind effect, ii) the numerical pupil derotation and mis-reg compensation, iii) the adaptation to transient disturbance signals such as telescope-to-instrument handover control and iv) the compliance with constrained modal control of the pre-focal beam corrector mirrors (M4/M5).
The overall METIS wavefront control strategy consists in a split approach cemented in a sequence of steps: 1) Tikhonov-regularised spatial wavefront estimation/reconstruction on a zonal Cartesian coordinate system tied to the pyramid (P-WFS) sampling pixel grid, 2) the regularised projection onto a global modal control space including correction of mis-registrations and rotation between the P-WFS coordinate grid and the ELTs M4/M5, and 3) the time-filtering through the application of proportional-integral control before converting to actuator commands readied for the ELTs collaborative TT off-loading scheme whilst avoiding hitting the mirrors constraints in amplitude, speed and force.
We present physical-optics simulation results of the whole AO system obtained with prototyped instances of the real-time and soft-real-time computers including sensitivity analysis with respect to observational, atmospheric, non-atmospheric (telescope-intrinsic such as wind-induced low-order modes comprising tip-tilt) and instrument-specific conditions and disturbances.
An error budget is put together that meets the METIS science requirements in terms of wavefront error with reassuring margins thus endorsing the strategy devised.
Multiconjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) promises uniform wide-field atmospheric correction. However, partial illumination of the layers at which the deformable mirrors are conjugated results in incomplete information about the full turbulence field. We report on a working solution to this difficulty for layer-oriented MCAO, including laboratory and on-sky demonstration with the LINC-NIRVANA instrument at the Large Binocular Telescope. This approach has proven to be simple and stable.
At the ground layer, the footprints of the stars overlap completely and every star footprint illuminates the entire pupil-plane. However, for a higher layer, the footprints do not overlap completely and each star illuminates a different region of the conjugated plane. Lack of stars, therefore, results in some regions in this "meta-pupil"-plane not being illuminated, implying no information regarding the aberrations in these areas. The optimum way of correcting the high layer, given this limited information, is the crux of the "partial illumination issue". In this paper, we propose a solution for this issue and discuss laboratory results from the aligned LN bench in the lab. Currently, LN has completed the re-integration and re-alignment at LBT. In early June 2016, we tested our partial illumination algorithm in the instrument’s final configuration in the LBT mountain lab, using simulated stars. On sky testing will begin in late 2016.
The internal SCAO system designed to maximize the performance for bright targets and has its wavefront sensors (WFSs) build inside the METIS cryostat to minimize the number of warm surfaces towards the science detectors. Although the internal dichroic will reflect all light short wards of 3 micrometers towards the WFS, only the IR light will most likely be used, mainly due to the expected improved performance at longer wavelengths for the WFS. A trade-off has been made between both visible versus infrared wave front sensing as well as Pyramid versus Shack-Hartmann, under various observing conditions and target geometries, taking into account performance, target availability, reliability and technology readiness level. The base line for the SCAO system is to minimize system complexity, thereby ensuring system availability and reliability even under first-light conditions.
Since the SCAO system will require a bright guide star near the science target, it can only be used for a limited number of targets. The LTAO system, consisting of up to 6 LGS and up to 3 low-order NGS WFS and located outside the cryostat, is designed to increase the sky coverage on arbitrary targets to >80%. Investigations are ongoing if the internal SCAO system can be used as either a Low-Order WFS or metrology system.
View contact details
No SPIE Account? Create one
