Focus errors from tracking sodium layer altitude variations with laser guide star adaptive optics for the Thirty Meter Telescope

Physics – Optics

Scientific paper

Rate now

  [ 0.00 ] – not rated yet Voters 0   Comments 0

Details

4

Scientific paper

Laser guide star (LGS) adaptive optics systems for extremely large telescopes must handle an important effect that is negligible for current generation telescopes. Wavefront errors, due to improperly focusing laser wavefront sensors (WFS) on the mesospheric sodium layer, are proportional to the square of the telescope diameter. The sodium layer, whose mean altitude is approximately 90 km, can move vertically at rates of up to a few metres per second; a few seconds lag in refocusing can substantially degrade delivered image quality (15 m of defocus can cause 120 nm residual wavefront error on a 30-m telescope.) As well, the range of temporal frequencies of sodium altitude focus, overlaps the temporal frequencies of focus caused by atmospheric turbulence. Only natural star wavefront sensors can disentangle this degeneracy. However, applying corrections with representative focus mechanisms having modest control bandwidths causes appreciable tracking errors. In principle, electronic offsets measured by natural guide star detectors could be rapidly applied to laser WFS measurements, but to provide useable sky coverage, integrating sufficient photons causes an unavoidable time delay, again resulting in potentially serious focus tracking errors. However, our analysis depends on extrapolating to temporal frequencies greater than 1 Hz from power spectra of sodium profile time series taken at 1-2 minute intervals. In principle, with a pulsed laser, (e.g. 3-μs pulses) and dynamic refocusing on a polar-coordinate CCD, this focus tracking error may be eliminated. This result is an additional benefit of dynamic refocusing beyond the commonly recognized amelioration of LGS WFS spot elongation.

No associations

LandOfFree

Say what you really think

Search LandOfFree.com for scientists and scientific papers. Rate them and share your experience with other people.

Rating

Focus errors from tracking sodium layer altitude variations with laser guide star adaptive optics for the Thirty Meter Telescope does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Focus errors from tracking sodium layer altitude variations with laser guide star adaptive optics for the Thirty Meter Telescope, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Focus errors from tracking sodium layer altitude variations with laser guide star adaptive optics for the Thirty Meter Telescope will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

     

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1625809

  Search
All data on this website is collected from public sources. Our data reflects the most accurate information available at the time of publication.