Facility integration of the NASA IRTF adaptive secondary mirror
Abstract
IRTF-ASM-1 has been functioning well since its first light in 2024. This adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) was primarily developed to be an on-sky demonstration of the new hybrid variable reluctance actuator technology at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF). However, due to its physical robustness and our previous demonstrations of sensitivity enhancements with the ASM, we are interested in using it to optimize telescope image quality on a nightly basis. This will directly benefit science observations. However, as IRTF does not currently have adaptive optics expertise, we have been developing the system to be used with minimal human intervention. We present our progress in developing software for active optics mode with IRTF-ASM-1 using the single conjugate, facility 2x2 Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor Felix. We also present techniques for removing low-order, large amplitude non-common path aberrations between Felix and our science instruments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2608.00373,
title = {Facility integration of the NASA IRTF adaptive secondary mirror},
author = {Ellen Lee and Mark Chun and Michael Connelley and Ruihan Zhang and Olivier Lai and Tony Denault and John Rayner and Max Baeten and Arjo Bos and Matias Kidron and Fred Kamphues and Stefan Kuiper and Wouter Jonker and Alan Ryan and Philip Hinz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.00373},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
11 pages, 6 figures. In SPIE Adaptive Optics Systems X