This paper presents an update on the design and deployment of the HIA MCAO laboratory bench. This bench directly supports the development of NFIRAOS, the first light MCAO facility for the Thirty Meter Telescope. The bench implements a closed-loop MCAO system, with two magnetic DMs, four LGS Shack-Hartmann WFSs, two NGS T/T WFS, one NGS T/T/F WFS and one higher order Truth WFS, making up a scaled down version of NFIRAOS. The bench includes several artificial turbulence screens and reproduces realistic LGS spot elongations. It is driven by software in Matlab, frame-rates ranging from 1Hz to 15Hz. The goals of this bench are to anchor the NFIRAOS end-toend simulation tools; to exercise real-time LGS tomographic AO in a variety of well controlled conditions, such as faint and poorly corrected NGSs, non-uniformities in the sodium layer and field dependant Non-Common-Path Aberrations (NCPAs); develop and demonstrate calibration procedures, such as PSF reconstruction and tomographic reconstruction and correction of field dependant NCPAs; and to validate optimization methods that operate at 10+ second time scales, which is not tractable in a numerical simulation, such as matched filter update and Cn2 estimation using a SLODAR method.

Date Published: 13 September 2012
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 8447, Adaptive Optics Systems III, 844750 (13 September 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.927236

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8447:
Adaptive Optics Systems III
Brent L. Ellerbroek; Enrico Marchetti; Jean-Pierre Véran, Editor(s)