Liviu Ivanescu

Fast calibration of high-order adaptive optics systems

We present a new method of calibrating adaptive optics systems that greatly reduces the required calibration time or, equivalently, improves the signal-to-noise ratio. The method uses an optimized actuation scheme with Hadamard patterns and does not scale with the number of actuators for a given noise level in the wavefront sensor channels. It is therefore highly desirable for high-order systems and/or adaptive secondary systems on a telescope without a Gregorian focal plane. In the latter case, the measurement noise is increased by the effects of the turbulent atmosphere when one is calibrating on a natural guide star.

MACAO-VLTI adaptive optics systems performance

In April and August ’03 two MACAO-VLTI curvature AO systems were installed on the VLT telescopes unit 2 and 3 in Paranal (Chile). These are 60 element systems using a 150mm bimorph deformable mirror and 60 APD’s as WFS detectors. Valuable integration & commissioning experience has been gained during these 2 missions. Several tests have been performed in order to evaluate system performance on the sky. The systems have proven to be extremely robust, performing in a stable fashion in extreme seeing condition (seeing up to 3”). Strehl ratio of 0.65 and residual tilt smaller than 10 mas have been obtained on the sky in 0.8” seeing condition. Weak guide source performance is also excellent with a strehl of 0.26 on a V~16 magnitude star. Several functionalities have been successfully tested including: chopping, off-axis guiding, atmospheric refraction compensation etc. The AO system can be used in a totally automatic fashion with a small overhead: the AO loop can be closed on the target less than 60 sec after star acquisition by the telescope. It includes reading the seeing value given by the site monitor, evaluate the guide star magnitude (cycling through neutral density filters) setting the close-loop AO parameters (system gain and vibrating membrane mirror stroke) including calculation of the command-matrix. The last 2 systems will be installed in August ’04 and in the course of 2005.

MACAO-VLTI: an adaptive optics system for the ESO interferometer

MACAO stands for Multi Application Curvature Adaptive Optics. A similar concept is applied to fulfill the need for wavefront correction for several VLT instruments. MACAO-VLTI is one of these built in 4 copies in order to equip the Coude focii of the ESO VLTs. The optical beams will then be corrected before interferometric recombination in the VLTI (Very Large Telescope Interferometer) laboratory. MACAO-VLTI uses a 60 elements bimorph mirror and curvature wavefront sensor. A custom made board processes the signals provided by the wavefront detectors, 60 Avalanche Photo-diodes, and transfer them to a commercial Power PC CPU board for Real Time Calculation. Mirrors Commands are sent to a High Voltage amplifier unit through an optical fiber link. The tip-tilt correction is done by a dedicated Tip-tilt mount holding the deformable mirror. The whole wavefront is located at the Coude focus. Software is developed in house and is ESO compatible. Expected performance is a Strehl ratio sligthly under 60% at 2.2 micron for bright reference sources (star V<10) and a limiting magnitude of 17.5 (Strehl ~0.1). The four systems will be installed in Paranal successively, the first one being planned for June 2003 and the last one for June 2004.

Real-time Control of ESO Adaptive Optics Systems Echtzeitsteuerung der ESO Adaptive Optik Systeme

Abstract The light coming from a star travels undisturbed for billions of kilometers until it reaches the boundaries of the Earth atmosphere: there small differences in the refraction index distort the spherical wavefront, creating phase errors in the image-forming ray paths. Even at the best sites, ground-based telescopes observing at visible wavelengths cannot, because of atmospheric turbulence alone, achieve an angular resolution better than telescopes of 10- to 20-cm diameter. Adaptive Optics (AO) is a technique to remove the effects of these distortions in real-time by operating a deformable mirror that rapidly adapts its shape to the atmospheric disturbance canceling it. ESO now operates several AO systems in the Paranal observatory, where the four telescopes of the VLT (Very Large Telescope) are installed. Several of them are the result of a common project called MACAO, for Multi Application Curvature Adaptive Optics. Four MACAO systems, one for each VLT telescope, are now serving the VLT-Interferometer (VLTI) increasing the capability of the interferometer. In this paper we will present the main concept of adaptive optics and then we will derive a model for a generic AO system. We will then tailor the model to MACAO and study some interesting features of MACAO as the control of the piston mode and the control of the tip/tilt modes.

Calibration of a curvature sensor/bimorph mirror AO system: interaction matrix measurement on MACAO systems

The accurate calibration of an AO system is fundamental in order to reach the top performance expected from design. To improve this aspect, we propose procedures for calibrating a curvature AO system in view of optimizing performances and robustness, based on the experience accumulated by the ESO AO team through the development of MACAO systems for VLTI and SINFONI. The approach maximizes the quality of the Interaction Matrix (IM) while maintaining the system in its linear regime and minimizing noise and bias on the measurement.

Adaptive optics projects at ESO

Over the past two years ESO has reinforced its efforts in the field of Adaptive Optics. The AO team has currently the challenging objectives to provide 8 Adaptive Optics systems for the VLT in the coming years and has now a world-leading role in that field. This paper will review all AO projects and plans. We will present an overview of the Nasmyth Adaptive Optics System (NAOS) with its infrared imager CONICA installed successfully at the VLT last year. Sodium Laser Guide Star plans will be introduced. The status of the 4 curvature AO systems (MACAO) developed for the VLT interferometer will be discussed. The status of the SINFONI AO module developed to feed the infrared integral field spectrograph (SPIFFI) will be presented. A short description of the Multi-conjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator MAD and its instrumentation will be introduced. Finally, we will present the plans for the VLT second-generation AO systems and the researches performed in the frame of OWL.

Interferometric fringes with MACAO-VLTI corrected starlight and VINCI

We report on observations with MACAO-VLTI to feed the VLT Interferometer in November 2003. The purpose of this observing run was to optimize the feed to the VLTI by varying certain parameters of the curvature AO system and of the interferometer instrument VINCI. All along the main concern about this instrument combination was the differential piston introduced by 2 independent AO systems. A special so-called “piston removal algorithm” has been developed especially for this purpose. Each DM Influence Function is carefully characterized and a pure piston mode is defined to compensate piston over the pupil produced by a given voltage set. Piston is reduced by ~20 using this algorithm. It was found that decreasing the system main gain, while reducing strehl ratio, also reduces high frequency vibrations on the DM and therefore OPD variations. A control frequency of 420 Hz instead of the nominal 350 Hz was found to improve substantially the coupling by reducing the excitation of the DM resonance (~700Hz). On bright stars, an improvement of a factor of 30 in the flux injection into the VINCI fibers was measured. Following these tests a successful observation of the active nucleus of NGC 1068 was performed leading to a visibility of 40.4±5.4% on an average baseline of 45.84 m. The K magnitude in the 60 mas central source is 9.2±0.4. The results already put some interesting constraints on the inner torus and central engine of the nucleus of NGC 1068 but mostly show that the combination MACAO-VLTI and VINCI opens the realm of extragalactic astronomy to interferometry.

MACAO-VLTI piston issue: achieving the interferometry requirements

MACAO-VLTI is a set of four adaptive optics systems dedicated to interferometry with the ESO 8 meter telescopes in Paranal, Chile. One of the most important requirements for the MACAO-VLTI is to keep the piston variations of the bimorph deformable mirror below 25 nm RMS in a time window of 48 msec. For this purpose, a piston removal algorithm has been developed, that uses a pre-calibrated set of voltages to compensate the natural piston of each influence function. This pre-calibration constitutes a critical laboratory measurement of the influence functions. Using Hadamard matrices, a (64 x 64) Shack-Hartman sensor and a capacitive sensor located at the center of the mirror (back-side), an accuracy better than 1% has been reached to characterize them. Various configurations were investigated to minimize the dynamical residual piston: the control matrix, the loop speed and the loop gain. Particular attention was paid to the influence functions non-linearities. An original indirect method was developed to measure the residual piston in real-time. We present here the methods and results obtained so far.