Jerry Nelson

Phasing the Mirror Segments of the Keck Telescopes: The Broadband Phasing Algorithm

To achieve its full diffraction limit in the infrared, the primary mirror of the Keck telescope (now telescopes) must be properly phased: The steps or piston errors between the individual mirror segments must be reduced to less than 100 nm. We accomplish this with a wave optics variation of the Shack-Hartmann test, in which the signal is not the centroid but rather the degree of coherence of the individual subimages. Using filters with a variety of coherence lengths, we can capture segments with initial piston errors as large as +/-30 microm and reduce these to 30 nm--a dynamic range of 3 orders of magnitude. Segment aberrations contribute substantially to the residual errors of approximately 75 nm.

The status of the Thirty Meter Telescope project

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) Project will design and build a thirty-meter diameter telescope for research in astronomy at optical and infrared wavelengths. TMT is a partnership between the University of California, Caltech, and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy (ACURA). The

Thirty Meter Telescope Site Testing I: Overview

80 million TMT design and development phase is fully funded and Preliminary Design is in progress. An additional

TMT status report

300 million has been pledged towards early TMT construction which will commence in 2009. We include a high level description of the design of the telescope and its planned adaptive optics and science instrumentation. The schedule of key milestones for completing the design and construction is summarized.

Design concepts for the California Extremely Large Telescope (CELT)

As part of the conceptual and preliminary design processes of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the TMT site-testing team has spent the last five years measuring the atmospheric properties of five candidate mountains in North and South America with an unprecedented array of instrumentation. The site-testing period was preceded by several years of analyses selecting the five candidates: Cerros Tolar, Armazones and Tolonchar in northern Chile; San Pedro Martir in Baja California, Mexico; and the 13 North (13N) site on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Site testing was concluded by the selection of two remaining sites for further consideration, Armazones and Mauna Kea 13N. It showed that all five candidates are excellent sites for an extremely large astronomical observatory and that none of the sites stands out as the obvious and only logical choice based on its combined properties. This is the first article in a series discussing the TMT site-testing project.

Primary mirror segmentation studies for the Thirty Meter Telescope

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) Project will design and build a thirty-meter diameter telescope for research in astronomy at optical and infrared wavelengths. TMT is a partnership between the University of California, Caltech, Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy (ACURA), and the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA). The TMT design and development phase is funded and work is underway. We include a high level description of the design of the telescope and its planned adaptive optics and science instrumentation. The organizational structure of the project is summarized along with the schedule of key milestones in the design. We are carrying out key conceptual and cost reviews in 2006 and will be prepared to begin construction in 2009, with first light in 2015.

The design and optimization of detectors for adaptive optics wavefront sensing

The California Extremely Large Telescope is a study currently underway by the University of California and the California Institute of Technology, to assess the feasibility of building a 30-m ground based telescope that will push the frontiers to observational astronomy. The telescope will be fully steerable, with a large field of view, and be able to work in both a seeing-limited arena and as a diffraction-limited telescope, with adaptive optics.

Progress on the California Extremely Large Telescope (CELT)

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project, a partnership between ACURA, Caltech, and the University of California, is currently developing a 30-meter diameter optical telescope. The primary mirror will be composed of 492 low expansion glass segments. Each segment is hexagonal, nominally measuring 1.44m across the corners. Because the TMT primary mirror is curved (i.e. not flat) and segmented with uniform 2.5mm nominal gaps, the resulting hexagonal segment outlines cannot all be identical. All segmentation approaches studied result in some combination of shape and size variations. These variations range from fractions of a millimeter to several millimeters. Segmentation schemes for the TMT primary mirror are described in some detail. Various segmentation approaches are considered, with the goal being to minimize various measures of shape variation between segments, thereby reducing overall design complexity and cost. Two radial scaling formulations are evaluated for their effectiveness at achieving these goals. Optimal tuning of these formulations and detailed statistics of the resulting segment shapes are provided. Finally, we present the rationale used for selecting the preferred segmentation approach for TMT.

Design considerations for CELT adaptive optics

The most common detector configuration for Shack Hartmann (SH) wavefront sensors used for adaptive optics (AO) wavefront sensing is the quad cell. Advances in detectors, such as the CCDs being developed in a project on which we are collaborators (funded by the Adaptive Optics Development Program), make it possible to use larger pixel arrays. The CCD designs incorporate improved read amplifiers and novel pixel geometries optimized for laser guide star (LGS) AO wavefront sensing. While it is likely that finer sampling of the SH spot will improve the ability of the wavefront sensor to accurately determine the spot displacement, particularly for elongated or aberrated spots such as those seen in LGS AO systems, the optimal sampling is not dependent simply on the number of pixels but must also take into account the effects of photon and detector noise. The performance of a SH wavefront sensor also depends on the performance of the algorithm used to find the spot displacement. In the literature alternatives have been proposed to the common center of mass algorithm, but these have not been simulated in detail. In this paper we will describe the results of our study of the performance of a SH wavefront sensor with a well sampled spot. We will present results for simulations of the wavefront sensor that enable us to optimize the design of the detector for varying conditions of signal to noise and spot elongation. We will also discuss the application of correlation algorithms to SH wavefront sensors and present results regarding the performance and statistics of this algorithm.

Edge sensor design for the TMT

The California Extremely Large Telescope (CELT) is a joint project of the University of California and the California Institute of Technology to build and operate a 30-meter diameter telescope for research in astronomy at visible and infrared wavelengths. The current optical design calls for a primary, secondary, and tertiary mirror with Ritchey-Chretién foci at two Nasmyth platforms. The primary mirror is a mosaic of 1080 actively stabilized hexagonal segments. This paper summarizes the recent progress on the conceptual design of this telescope.