NFIRAOS adaptive optics for the Thirty Meter Telescope

Abstract

NFIRAOS (Narrow-Field InfraRed Adaptive Optics System) will be the first-light multi-conjugate adaptive optics system for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). NFIRAOS houses all of its opto-mechanical subsystems within an optics enclosure cooled to precisely-30˚C in order to improve sensitivity in the near-infrared. It supports up to three client science instruments, including the first-light InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS). Powering NFIRAOS is a Real Time Controller that will process the signals from six laser wavefront sensors, one natural guide star pyramid WFS, up to three low-order on-instrument WFS and up to four guide windows on the client instrument's science detector in order to correct for atmospheric turbulence, windshake, optical errors and plate-scale distortion. NFIRAOS is currently preparing for its final design review in late June 2018 at NRC Herzberg in Victoria, British Columbia in partnership with Canadian industry and TMT.

Meeting the real-time challenges of ground-based telescopes using low-rank matrix computations

“…This significant improvement in time-to-solution can potentially unlock major breakthroughs in ground based astronomy, since the next generation of giant telescopes capabilities are almost entirely driven by AO performance. While the AO results shown in this paper utilize a Predictive Learn and Apply control scheme, more advanced approaches, such as Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) [21,46], can potentially bring a significant performance boost in terms of Strehl Ratio at the cost of significantly larger control matrices.…”

“…We ultimately assess its impact along with the accuracy threshold on the numerical accuracy of the output image. Although we primarily focus on MAVIS, our TLR-MVM implementation can be used across a wide range of AO instruments [8,14,21].…”

Mixed-Precision Tomographic Reconstructor Computations on Hardware Accelerators

“…Beyond MOAO and the MOSAIC instrument, the same approach can be generalized to support other AO concepts relying on multiple wavefront sensing directions and turbulence tomography [6]. For instance, one can cite the MAORY MCAO instrument on the E-ELT [25] but also the GMTIFS and associated Laser Tomography AO (LTAO) module on the GMT [26] or the future MCAO module for the TMT [27]. Hence, this work is meant to have a critical impact on both the design phases of most ELTs AO instrumentation programs as well as their future operations on-sky.…”

The Infrared Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) for TMT: final design development of the data reduction system

“…The large number of modes of operation and the requirement of real-time reduction for the observer poses unique challenges for the IRIS DRS. IRIS will interact with other subsystems such as NFIRAOS 4 and Telescope Control System (TCS) for its real-time operation and metadata collection. There is also need for early development of IRIS DRS to accommodate engineering activities during the long integration and testing phase.…”