We describe the current performance of the Palomar 200 inch (5 m) adaptive optics system, which in December of 1998 achieved its first high order (241 actuators) lock on a natural guide star. In the K band (2.2 pm), the system has achieved Strehi ratios as high as 50% in the presence of 1.0 arcsecond seeing (0.5 tim). Predictions of the system's performance based on the analysis of real-time wavefront sensor telemetry data and a analysis based on a fitted Kolmogorov atmospheric model are shown to both agree with the observed science image performance. Performance predictions for various seeing conditions are presented and an analysis of the error budget is used to show which subsystems limit the performance of the AO system under various atmospheric conditions.
Adaptive optics systems with Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors require reconstruction of the atmospheric phase error from subaperture slope measurements, with every sensor in the array being used in the computation of each actuator command. This fully populated reconstruction matrix can result in a significant computational burden for adaptive optics systems with large numbers of actuators. A method for generating sparse wavefront reconstruction matrices for adaptive optics is proposed. The method exploits the relevance of nearby subaperture slope measurements for control of an individual actuator, and relies upon the limited extent of the influence function for a zonal deformable mirror. Relying only on nearby sensor information can significantly reduce the calculation time for wavefront reconstruction. In addition, a hierarchic controller is proposed to recover some of the global wavefront information. The performance of these sparse wavefront reconstruction matrices was evaluated in simulation, and tested on the Palomar Adaptive Optics System. This paper presents some initial results from the simulations and experiments.
Work is underway at the University of Chicago and Caltech Optical Observatories to implement a sodium laser guide star adaptive optics system for the 200 inch Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory. The Chicago sum frequency laser (CSFL) consists of two pulsed, diode-pumped, mode-locked Nd:YAG lasers working at 1.064 micron and 1.32 micron wavelengths. Light from the two laser beams is mixed in a non-linear crystal to produce radiation centered at 589 nm with a spectral width of 1.0 GHz (FWHM) to match that of the Sodium-D2 line. Currently the 1.064 micron and 1.32 micron lasers produce 14 watts and 8 watts of TEM-00 power respectively. The laser runs at 500 Hz rep. rate with 10% duty cycle. This pulse format is similar to that of the MIT-Lincoln labs and allows range gating of unwanted Rayleigh scatter down an angle of 60 degrees to zenith angle.The laser system will be kept in the Coude lab and will be projected up to a laser launch telescope (LLT) bore-sited to the Hale telescope. The beam-transfer optics, which conveys the laser beam from the Coude lab to the LLT, consists of motorized mirrors that are controlled in real time using quad-cell positioning systems. This needs to be done to prevent laser beam wander due to deflections of the telescope while tracking. There is a central computer that monitors the laser beam propagation up to the LLT, the interlocks and safety system status, laser status and actively controls the motorized mirrors.We plan to install a wide-field visible camera (for high flying aircraft) and a narrow field of view (FoV) IR camera (for low-flying aircraft) as part of our aircraft avoidance system.
Adaptive optics (AO) systems currently under investigation will require at least two orders of magitude increase in the number of actuators, which in turn translates to effectively a 10 4 increase in compute latency. Since the performance of an AO system invariably improves as the compute latency decreases, it is important to study how today's computer systems will scale to address this expected increase in actuator utilization. This paper answers this question by characterizing the performance of a single deformable mirror (DM) Shack-Hartmann natural guide star AO system implemented on the present-generation digital signal processor (DSP) TMS320C6701 from Texas Instruments. We derive the compute latency of such a system in terms of a few basic parameters, such as the number of DM actuators, the number of data channels used to read out the camera pixels, the number of DSPs, the available memory bandwidth, as well as the inter-processor communication (IPC) bandwidth and the pixel transfer rate. We show how the results would scale for future systems that utilizes multiple DMs and guide stars. We demonstrate that the principal performance bottleneck of such a system is the available memory bandwidth of the processors and to lesser extent the IPC bandwidth. This paper concludes with suggestions for mitigating this bottleneck. Downloaded From: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 06/26/2016 Terms of Use: http://spiedigitallibrary.org/ss/TermsOfUse.aspx Proc. of SPIE Vol. 4839 913 Downloaded From: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 06/26/2016 Terms of Use: http://spiedigitallibrary.org/ss/TermsOfUse.aspx
We present laboratory subsystem test results obtained during integration of the Palomar 200" Adaptive Optics System at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These results pertain to the 241 actively controlled actuator, Shack-Hartmann sensed, initial delivery of a system optimized for near infrared observation with the 5 meter diameter telescope at Palomar Mountain. This system initially exploits natural guide stars. Our intention is to provide a wide-ranging summary of subsystem performance measurements and several lessons learned. Noteworthy among these results is our measurement of 6.3 0.2 electron read noise performance of our initial WFS camera, based upon a 64 x 64 pixel MIT/LL CCD detector, running at 600 kilopixel per sec per output amplifier. This camera was constructed by SciMeasure Analytical Systems, Inc. ofDecatur, GA.
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