Optical Design for Extremely Large Telescope Adaptive Optics Systems

Abstract

Designing an adaptive optics (AO) system for extremely large telescopes (ELT's) will present new optical engineering challenges. Several of these challenges are addressed in this work, including first-order design of multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) systems, pyramid wavefront sensors (PWFS's), and laser guide star (LGS) spot elongation. MCAO systems need to be designed in consideration of various constraints, including deformable mirror size and correction height. The y,{bar y} method of first-order optical design is a graphical technique that uses a plot with marginal and chief ray heights as coordinates; the optical system is represented as a segmented line. This method is shown to be a powerful tool in designing MCAO systems. From these analyses, important conclusions about configurations are derived. PWFS's, which offer an alternative to Shack-Hartmann (SH) wavefront sensors (WFS's), are envisioned as the workhorse of layer-oriented adaptive optics. Current approaches use a 4-faceted glass pyramid to create a WFS analogous to a quad-cell SH WFS. PWFS's and SH WFS's are compared and some newly-considered similarities and PWFS advantages are presented. Techniques to extend PWFS's are offered: First, PWFS's can be extended to more pixels in the image by tiling pyramids contiguously. Second, pyramids, which are difficult to manufacture, can be replaced by less expensive lenslet arrays. An approach is outlined to convert existing SH WFS's to PWFS's for easy evaluation of PWFS's. Also, a demonstration of PWFS's in sensing varying amounts of an aberration is presented. For ELT's, the finite altitude and finite thickness of LGS's means that the LGS will appear elongated from the viewpoint of subapertures not directly under the telescope. Two techniques for dealing with LGS spot elongation in SH WFS's are presented. One method assumes that the laser will be pulsed and uses a segmented micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) to track the LGS light subaperture by subaperture as the light is returned from the upward-propagating laser pulse. A second method can be used if the laser is not pulsed. A lenslet array is described which creates ''pixels'' which are aligned with the axes of the elongated spot of each subaperture, without requiring special charge-coupled devices (CCD's).