Controlling wavefront distortions across a thermal boundary

Robert Hubbard; Thomas Rimmele; William Schoening; Nathan Dalrymple; Gary Poczulp; Mark Warner

doi:10.1117/12.670541

4 July 2006 Controlling wavefront distortions across a thermal boundary

Robert Hubbard, Thomas Rimmele, William Schoening, Nathan Dalrymple, Gary Poczulp, Mark Warner

Proceedings Volume 6267, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes; 626722 (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.670541
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2006, Orlando, Florida , United States

Abstract

We present the details of an experimental apparatus built to explore wavefront distortion and its mitigation when an optical beam passes from one thermal environment into another. The experiment simulates a situation within the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) baseline design where the beam travels from an ambient-temperature environment into a thermostatically controlled "room temperature" environment. We found that an 8°C temperature difference between the two environments introduces about 125 nm rms of wavefront distortion. A double air curtain (one on each side of the boundary) reduces this to about 30 nm rms. We also showed that the high-order (>1300 DoF) adaptive optics system which is integral to the ATST design will be able to further reduce this to about 5 nm rms, well within our initial error budget.

Citation Download Citation

Robert Hubbard, Thomas Rimmele, William Schoening, Nathan Dalrymple, Gary Poczulp, and Mark Warner "Controlling wavefront distortions across a thermal boundary", Proc. SPIE 6267, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes, 626722 (4 July 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.670541

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