WIVERN is a testbed for experiments in non-LGS laser-based wavefront sensing, because it is difficult to conceive of wide-field MCAO and MOAO over arcminute scales with good sky-coverage with a practical number of LGS. This presentation focuses on one of two non-LGS concepts we are studying: correlating Shack Hartmann WFS on laser generated speckle. The concept involves projecting random laser speckle into the atmosphere and using Rayleigh back-scattering to re-image the high-contrast pattern in the WFS. WIVERN is designed to emulate laser uplink through the atmosphere, back-scattering from up-to 20km distance, assuming a 8m telescope aperture, and finally reception back at the pupil, via one or two phase screens resulting in 0.8 to 1.6 arcsec seeing. The WFS measurements use both on- and off-axis point sources (emulated NGS) and the re-imaged laser speckle. These are then compared to show the consistency in measured slopes, demonstrating the potential of tomographic sensing with speckle. For context, simulation results that confirm the bench measurements are shown. Finally, the necessary calibration procedure for the DM interaction matrix is described together with initial results.
HARMONI is the first light visible and near-IR integral field spectrograph for the ELT. It covers a large spectral range from 450 nm to 2450 nm with resolving powers from 3500 to 18000 and spatial sampling from 60 mas to 4 mas. It can operate in two Adaptive Optics modes - SCAO (including a High Contrast capability) and LTAO - or with NOAO. The project is preparing for Final Design Reviews. HARMONI is a work-horse instrument that provides efficient, spatially resolved spectroscopy of extended objects or crowded fields of view. The gigantic leap in sensitivity and spatial resolution that HARMONI at the ELT will enable promises to transform the landscape in observational astrophysics in the coming decade. The project has undergone some key changes to the leadership and management structure over the last two years. We present the salient elements of the project restructuring, and modifications to the technical specifications. The instrument design is very mature in the lead up to the final design review. In this paper, we provide an overview of the instrument's capabilities, details of recent technical changes during the red flag period, and an update of sensitivities.
WIVERN is a testbed for laboratory experiments in laser-based wavefront sensing. It emulates laser uplink from a 4m telescope with 1.6 arcsec seeing and laser back-scattering from up to 20 km. Currently there are three current wavefront sensing capabilities. The first two are from a wide-field of view (1.0 arcmin) Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor observing a constellation of point sources at infinity (reference targets, star-oriented wavefront sensing), or an image from emulated back-scattering (wide-field correlation wavefront sensing). The third is based on the PPPP concept. Other sub-systems are laser projection replicating a pupil launch, a 7x7 pupil-conjugate deformable mirror (DM), and a wide-field camera for PSF analysis. A 500 Hz rate accumulates sufficient data for statistical and machine-learning analysis over hour timescales. It is a compact design (2.1m2) with mostly commercial dioptric components. The sub-system optical interfaces are identical: a flat focal plane for easy bench reconfiguration. The end-to-end design is diffraction-limited with ≤ 1% pupil distortion for wavelengths λ=633–750 nm.
HARMONI is the first light, adaptive optics assisted, integral field spectrograph for the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). A work-horse instrument, it provides the ELT’s diffraction limited spectroscopic capability across the near-infrared wavelength range. HARMONI will exploit the ELT’s unique combination of exquisite spatial resolution and enormous collecting area, enabling transformational science. The design of the instrument is being finalized, and the plans for assembly, integration and testing are being detailed. We present an overview of the instrument’s capabilities from a user perspective, and provide a summary of the instrument’s design. We also include recent changes to the project, both technical and programmatic, that have resulted from red-flag actions. Finally, we outline some of the simulated HARMONI observations currently being analyzed.
Direct imaging instruments have the spatial resolution to resolve exoplanets from their host star. This enables direct characterization of the exoplanets atmosphere, but most direct imaging instruments do not have spectrographs with high enough resolving power for detailed atmospheric characterization. We investigate the use of a single-mode diffraction-limited integral-field unit that is compact and easy to integrate into current and future direct imaging instruments for exoplanet characterization. This achieved by making use of recent progress in photonic manufacturing to create a single-mode fiber-fed image reformatter. The fiber link is created with three-dimensional printed lenses on top of a single-mode multicore fiber that feeds an ultrafast laser inscribed photonic chip that reformats the fiber into a pseudoslit. We then couple it to a first-order spectrograph with a triple stacked volume phase holographic grating for a high efficiency over a large bandwidth. The prototype system has had a successful first-light observing run at the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope. The measured on-sky resolving power is between 2500 and 3000, depending on the wavelength. With our observations, we show that single-mode integral-field spectroscopy is a viable option for current and future exoplanet imaging instruments.
HARMONI is the adaptive optics assisted, near-infrared and visible light integral field spectrograph for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). A first light instrument, it provides the work-horse spectroscopic capability for the ELT. As the project approaches its Final Design Review milestone, the design of the instrument is being finalized, and the plans for assembly, integration and testing are being detailed. We present an overview of the instrument’s capabilities from a user perspective, provide a summary of the instrument’s design, including plans for operations and calibrations, and provide a brief glimpse of the predicted performance for a specific observing scenario. The paper also provides some details of the consortium composition and its evolution since the project commenced in 2015.
On-sky testing of new instrumentation concepts is required before they can be incorporated within facility-class instrumentation with certainty that they will work as expected within a real telescope environment. Increasingly, many of these concepts are not designed to work in seeing-limited conditions and require an upstream adaptive optics system for testing. Access to on-sky AO systems to test such systems is currently limited to a few research groups and observatories worldwide, leaving many concepts unable to be tested. A pilot program funded through the H2020 OPTICON program offering up to 15 nights of on-sky time at the CANARY Adaptive Optics demonstrator is currently running but this ends in 2021. Pre-run and on-sky support is provided to visitor experiments by the CANARY team. We have supported 6 experiments over this period, and plan one more run in early 2021. We have recently been awarded for funding through the H2020 OPTICON-RADIO PILOT call to continue and extend this program up until 2024, offering access to CANARY at the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope and 3 additional instruments and telescopes suitable for instrumentation development. Time on these facilities will be open to researchers from across the European research community and time will be awarded by answering a call for proposals that will be assessed by an independent panel of instrumentation experts. Unlike standard observing proposals we plan to award time up to 2 years in advance to allow time for the visitor instrument to be delivered. We hope to announce the first call in mid-2021. Here we describe the facilities offered, the support available for on-sky testing and detail the eligibility and application process.
Point-diffraction interferometers are a class of wavefront sensors which can directly measure the phase with great accuracy, regardless of defects such as vortices and disconnected apertures. Due to these properties, they have been suggested in applications such as cophasing of telescope segments, wavefront sensing impervious to the island effect and high-contrast AO and imaging. This paper presents an implementation of this class of interferometer, the Calibration & Alignment~WFS (CAWS), and the results of the first on-sky tests in the visible behind the SCAO loop of the CANARY AO experiment at the William Herschel Telescope. An initial analysis of AO residuals is performed in order to retrieve the SNR of interference fringes and assess the instrument's performance under various observing conditions. Finally, these results are used to test the validity of our models, which would allow for rapid implementation-specific modelling to find minimum-useful flux and other CAWS limits.
The Multi-Core Integral-Field Unit (MCIFU) is a new diffraction-limited near-infrared integral-field unit for exoplanet atmosphere characterization with extreme adaptive optics (xAO) instruments. It has been developed as an experimental pathfinder for spectroscopic upgrades for SPHERE+/VLT and other xAO systems. The wavelength range covers 1.0 um to 1.6um at a resolving power around 5000 for 73 points on-sky. The MCIFU uses novel astrophotonic components to make this very compact and robust spectrograph. We performed the first successful on-sky test with CANARY at the 4.2 meter William Herschel Telescope in July 2019, where observed standard stars and several stellar binaries. An improved version of the MCIFU will be used with MagAO-X, the new extreme adaptive optics system at the 6.5 meter Magellan Clay telescope in Chile. We will show and discuss the first-light performance and operations of the MCIFU at CANARY and discuss the integration of the MCIFU with MagAO-X.
In long-baseline interferometry, over the last few decades integrated optics beam combiners have become at- tractive technological solutions for new-generation instruments operating at infrared wavelengths. We have investigated different architectures of discrete beam combiners (DBC), which are 2D lattice arrangement of channel waveguides that can be fabricated by exploiting the 3D capability of the ultrafast laser inscription (ULI) fabrication techniques. Here, we present the first interferometric on-sky results of an integrated optics beam combiner based on a coherent pupil remapper and 4 input/23 output zig-zag based DBC, both written monolith- ically in a single borosilicate glass. We show the preliminary results of visibility amplitudes and closure phases obtained from the Vega star by using the previously calibrated transfer matrix of the device.
Adaptive Optics (AO) is a necessary technology for ensuring the success of the next generation of extremely large telescopes (ELTs). It’s used to help mitigate the perturbing effects of Earth’s atmosphere on the incoming light from astronomical objects and will be an integral part of ELTs for obtaining close to diffraction limited images. To maintain a correction of the incoming wavefront under dynamic atmospheric conditions, which can change significantly on the order of milliseconds, the frame-by-frame reconstruction must be operated in real-time, with hard limits on the time interval between measuring the disturbance and applying a correction. The main problem size for AO RTC increases with the 4th power of telescope diameter and so the computational demands of AO RTCs for ELTs, with primary mirror diameters between 20-40m, increase significantly compared to the current generation of 10m class telescopes. This makes the investigation into and the development of real-time controllers (RTCs) for ELT scale AO systems critical for ensuring the effectiveness of these instruments for first light. Green Flash, which is an ongoing EU funded project, has the aim of investigating the optimal hardware architecture for ELT scale AO RTC, with an emphasis on GPU and Xeon Phi solutions. The Intel Xeon Phi, built using Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, incorporates ≥64 general purpose x86 CPU cores into a single CPU package paired with a large pool of on chip high bandwidth MCDRAM, it has many of the advantages of current technologies without some of the more significant drawbacks. The most computationally intensive aspects of most AO RTC pipelines are large matrix-vector multiplications mainly used to compute the reconstructed wavefronts which are highly parallelizable and are generally memory bandwidth bound. This makes the Xeon Phi with it’s large CPU count and high bandwidth memory ideally suited for acceleration of the reconstruction task and therefore for ELT scale AO RTC. The most recent incarnation of the Xeon Phi platform is available as a standard socketed x86 CPU allowing previous efforts made in developing CPU based RTC software to be used as a basis for a Xeon Phi based RTCs with the added advantage that any optimisations made for the MIC architecture can be carried forward to future x86 CPU based systems. The Durham Adaptive Optics Real-time Controller (DARC) is an example of a freely available, on-sky tested, fully modular, x86 CPU based AO RTC which which is ideally suited to be a basis for our investigation into ELT scale AO RTC performance. We present a proof of concept AO RTC system, in collaboration with the Green Flash project, using an optimised DARC on a multi-node homogeneous Xeon Phi cluster to demonstrate the potential of the MIC platform for AO RTC. We will present our methods of optimisation for the C based DARC for the Xeon Phi, including BIOS, kernel and OS tuning as well as considerations for multi-threading and massively parallel algorithm development.
The Green Flash initiative responds to a critical challenge in the astronomical community. Scaling up the real-time control solutions of AO instruments in operation to the specifications of the AO modules at the core of the next generation of extremely large telescopes is not a viable option. The main goal of this project is to design and build a prototype for an AO RTC targeting the E-ELT first-light AO instrumentation. We have proposed innovative technical solutions based on emerging technologies in High Performance Computing, assessed this enabling technologies through prototyping and are now assembling a full scale demonstrator to be validated with a simulator and eventually tested on sky. In this paper, we report on downselection process that led us to the final prototype architecture and the performance of our full scale prototype obtained with a real-time simulator.
With the next-generation of Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs), the demands of adaptive optics real-time control (AO RTC) increase massively compared to the most complex AO systems in use today. Green Flash, an ongoing EU funded project, is investigating the optimal architecture for ELT scale AO RTC, with an emphasis on GPU and many core CPU solutions. The Intel Xeon Phi range of x86 CPUs is our current focus of investigation into CPU technologies to solve the ELT-scale AO RTC problem. Built using Intels Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture incorporating 64 general purpose x86 CPU cores into a single CPU package paired with a large pool of on-chip high bandwidth MCDRAM, the Xeon Phi includes many of the advantages of current technologies. The current generation Xeon Phi is readily compatible with standard Linux operating systems and all of the tools and libraries, and as a standard socketed CPU it eliminates the latency introduced by the extra data transfers required for previous Xeon Phis and other accelerator devices. The Durham Adaptive Optics Real-time Controller (DARC) is a freely available, on-sky tested, fully modular, x86 CPU based AO RTC which which is ideally suited to be a basis for our investigation into ELT scale AO RTC performance. We present a proof of concept AO RTC system, in collaboration with the Green Flash project, for ELT scale MCAO, with the requirements of the MAORY AO system in mind, using an optimised DARC on Xeon Phi hardware to achieve the required performance.
We present the outcomes of an evaluation of middleware technologies for adaptive optics real-time control against the requirements of the Green Flash project, which are derived from the most demanding requirements of proposed first generation E-ELT instruments. The technology down-selection process applied in Green Flash is described, and measured performance of the selected middlewares on the hardware of a Green Flash prototype RTC are presented.
The continuous strive for increased sensitiv ity and higher resolution of space based telescopes can only be satisfied with larger primary mirrors. There are quite a few challenges in launching large mirrors in space such as surviving the stress created from the launch acceleration, deployment, thermoelastic deformations, the gravity release etc. Major constraint to space based application is weight which drives the development of thin, extremely lightweight mirrors. Such mirrors are prone for stress based deformations and need active optics correction chain (AOCC) in order to be operated at their full potential. An AOCC for large monolithic mirrors consists of three key active optics components: corrective element (e.g. deformable mirror or DM), wavefront sensor (WFS) and correction algorithm. In order to assess the feasibility of such a system we have developed an AOCC test stand in a collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) a nd Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). With this development we aim to measure the performance and the long-term reliability of an AOCC in controlled laboratory conditions. Our design consists of two separate parts, one where the expected aberrations are generated and another where they are measured and corrected. Two deformable mirrors of 37.5 mm and 116 mm are used, the smallest mirror to generate aberrations and the largest to correct them. For wavefront sensing we are using two different wavefront sensors, an 11x11 Shack-Hartmann as well as phase diversity based at the science sensor. We are able to emulate the conditions for both, astronomy related, and Earth observations. Here, we present the design of the system, including the test stand and the correction algorithms, the performance expected from simulations, and the results from the latest lab tests.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.