Abstract
Astronomical adaptive optics systems are used to increase effective telescope resolution. However, they cannot be used to observe the whole sky since one or more natural guide stars of sufficient brightness must be found within the telescope field of view for the AO system to work. Even when laser guide stars are used, natural guide stars are still required to provide a constant position reference. Here, we introduce a technique to overcome this problem by using rotary unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a platform from which to produce artificial guide stars. We describe the concept, which relies on the UAV being able to measure its precise relative position. We investigate the adaptive optics performance improvements that can be achieved, which in the cases presented here can improve the Strehl ratio by a factor of at least 2 for a 8~m class telescope. We also discuss improvements to this technique, which is relevant to both astronomical and solar adaptive optics systems.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has been developing rapidly in recent years, for rotary vehicles
We have presented a novel concept using UAVs to provide an artificial guide star (AGS) signal for adaptive optics systems, allowing full sky coverage to be achieved for AO corrected observations
For solar AO, this concept uses the UAV AGS to provide a high order wavefront sensor (WFS) signal for solar limb observations, where the solar structure itself cannot be used for AO correction
Summary
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has been developing rapidly in recent years, for rotary vehicles (e.g. quadcopters, hexacopters and octocopters) This has been driven by advances in battery performance, carbon fibre technology, and microcontroller advances. We explore the potential that this UAV technology has for the field of adaptive optics (AO), including both solar AO and astronomical AO, using UAVs to provide artificial guide stars. The sky coverage of astronomical AO systems (Babcock 1953) is limited by the availability of guide stars with sufficient flux close to the astronomical source of interest, even for wide field-of-view Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) instruments (Basden et al 2014). The relative position stability of the UAV platform must be sufficient to enable the light source to be maintained within the field of view of a ground-based wavefront sensor (WFS). Recent developments with hydrogen fuel cells has led to bespoke UAVs with significantly increased flight times and maximum altitudes
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