Kate Jackson (Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Victoria), Carlos Correia (NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics), Olivier Lardiere (Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Victoria), David Andersen (NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics), Colin Bradley (Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Victoria), Reston Nasha (Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Victoria)
Keywords: SSA
Abstract:
Raven will be a Multi-Object Adaptive Optics (MOAO) technology and science demonstrator on the Subaru telescope. It will be capable of deploying up to 3 natural guide star (NGS) wavefront sensors (WFS) as well as an on-axis laser guide star (LGS) WFS. Open loop correction will be performed on two independent science fields. In order to meet the key science requirement, 30% of the energy of an unresolved point spread function (PSF) must be ensquared within a 140 mas slit using existing WFS camera and deformable mirror (DM) technology. Raven is equipped with a calibration unit with a three layer turbulence generator; a preliminary demonstration of wavefront reconstruction will be carried out using the calibration unit and the NGS WFSs with a minimum mean square error (MMSE) reconstruction. In parallel, an on-going study of different approaches to tomographic reconstruction is being carried out to explore methods which will reduce the overall tomographic error and attempt to drive up the limiting magnitude of the NGSs, thus expanding sky-coverage. Recent results show that the application of a modal reconstructor to the measurements generates very similar performance to the MMSE reconstructor while providing the framework to implement a prediction algorithm.
Date of Conference: September 11-14, 2012
Track: Poster