Related papers: Prototype of a laser guide star wavefront sensor f…
Exoplanet direct imaging using adaptive optics (AO) is often limited by non-common path aberrations (NCPAs) and aberrations that are invisible to traditional pupil-plane wavefront sensors (WFSs). This can be remedied by focal-plane (FP)…
Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics systems based on sodium Laser Guide Stars may exploit Natural Guide Stars to solve intrinsic limitations of artificial beacons (tip-tilt indetermination and anisoplanatism) and to mitigate the impact of the…
The Multiconjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator (MAD) has successfully demonstrated on sky both Star Oriented (SO) and Layer Oriented (LO) multiconjugate adaptive optics techniques. While SO has been realized using 3 Shack-Hartmann…
The Ingot WFS, a Pyramid-like WFS, has been proposed as a relief to the LGS spot elongation. Actually, the artificial sources are confined in an excited cigar-shaped region in the sodium layer and portions of the telescope aperture have a…
Adaptive optics to correct current telescopes over wide fields, or future very large telescopes over even narrow fields, will require real-time wavefront measurements made with a constellation of laser beacons. Here we report the first such…
Commonly used wavefront sensors, the Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor and the pyramid wavefront sensor, for example, have large dynamic range or high sensitivity, trading one regime for the other. A new type of wavefront sensor is being…
One of the primary science goals of the Large UV/Optical/Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR) mission concept is to detect and characterize Earth-like exoplanets orbiting nearby stars with direct imaging. The success of its coronagraph instrument…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will use an active optics system (AOS) to maintain alignment and surface figure on its three large mirrors. Corrective actions fed to the LSST AOS are determined from information derived from 4…
In astronomy and microscopy, distortions in the wavefront affect the dynamic range of a high contrast imaging system. These aberrations are either imposed by a turbulent medium such as the atmosphere, by static or thermal aberrations in the…
Extreme wavefront correction is required for coronagraphs on future space telescopes to reach 1e-8 or better starlight suppression for the direct imaging and characterization of exoplanets in reflected light. Thus, a suite of wavefront…
Pulsed sodium laser guide stars (LGS) are useful because they allow for Rayleigh blanking and fratricide avoidance in multiple-LGS systems. Bloch-equation simulations of sodium-light interactions show that these may be able to achieve…
The Max-Planck institutes for astronomy (MPIA) and for extraterrestrial physics (MPE) run an adaptive optics (AO) system with a laser guide star at the 3.5 m telescope on Calar Alto, Spain. This system, called ALFA, produces now scientific…
Ground-based high contrast imaging (HCI) and extreme adaptive optics (AO) technologies have advanced to the point of enabling direct detections of gas-giant exoplanets orbiting beyond the snow lines around nearby young star systems.…
Future large segmented space telescopes and their coronagraphic instruments are expected to provide the resolution and sensitivity to observe Earth-like planets with a 10^10 contrast ratio at less than 100 mas from their host star. Advanced…
High throughput, low inner working angle (IWA) phase masks coronagraphs are essential to directly image and characterize (via spectroscopy) earth-like planets. However, the performance of low-IWA coronagraphs is limited by residual pointing…
After releasing reference camera solutions in the visible and infrared for natural guide star wavefront sensing with unbeaten performance, we will present the first results of First Light Imaging s C-MORE, the first laser guide star…
The performance of adaptive optics systems employing sodium laser guide stars can be improved by continuously monitoring the vertical density structure of mesospheric sodium along the line of sight. We demonstrate that sodium density…
Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors for both solar and laser guide star adaptive optics (with elongated spots) need to observe extended objects. Correlation techniques have been successfully employed to measure the wavefront gradient in solar…
LOFT (Large Observatory For x-ray Timing) is one of the four missions selected in 2011 for assessment study for the ESA M3 mission in the Cosmic Vision program, expected to be launched in 2024. The LOFT mission will carry two instruments…
MAORY is the adaptive optics module for ELT providing two gravity invariant ports with the same optical quality for two different client instruments. It enable high angular resolution observations in the near infrared over a large field of…