arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Guido Agapito.
MORFEO (Multi-conjugate adaptive Optics Relay For ELT Observations, formerly MAORY), the MCAO system for the ELT, will provide diffraction-limited optical quality to the large field camera MICADO. MORFEO has officially passed the Preliminary Design Review and it is entering the final design phase. We present the current status of the project, with a focus on the adaptive optics system aspects and expected milestones during the next project phase.
MORFEO (Multi-conjugate adaptive Optics Relay For ELT Observation) is the future multi-conjugate adaptive optics system for the ESO ELT that will feed the instrument MICADO (Multi-AO Imaging Camera for Deep Observations). It will use the 6 laser guide stars to give a uniform correction on a field-of-view of approximately 60arcsec of diameter. Tip, tilt and slow focus measurement will be done on up to three natural guide stars that could be really faint to maximize sky coverage. The current baseline is to use the reference wavefront sensor in the visible to acquire the star and center it on the low order wavefront sensor that has a much smaller field-of-view. In this work we study this problem focusing on the estimation error of the tilt from the reference wavefront sensor as a function of star magnitude and atmospheric conditions.
TIPTOP is a python library that is able to quickly compute Point Spread Functions (PSF) of any kind of Adaptive Optics systems. This library has multiple objectives: support the exposure time calculators of future VLT and ELT instruments, support adaptive optics systems design activities, be part of PSF reconstruction pipelines and support the selection of the best asterism of natural guide stars for observation preparation. Here we report one of the last improvements of TIPTOP: the introduction of the error given by a single conjugated laser, commonly known as the cone effect. The Cone effect was not introduced before because it is challenging due to the non-stationarity of the phase. Laser guide stars are at a finite distance with respect to the telescope and probe beam accepted by the wavefront sensor has the shape of a cone. Given a single spatial frequency in an atmospheric layer, the cone effect arises from the apparent magnification or stretching of this frequency when it reaches the wavefront sensor. The magnification effect leads to an incorrect estimation of the spatial frequency. Therefore, we estimate the residual power by calculating the difference between two sinusoids with different periods: the nominal one and the magnified one. Replicating this for each spatial frequency we obtain the power spectrum associated with the cone effect. We compare this estimation with the one given by end-to-end simulation and we present how we plan to validate this with on-sky data.
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a high contrast imaging instrument that aims to detect and characterize extrasolar planets. GPI is being upgraded to GPI 2.0, with several subsystems receiving a re-design to improve the instrument's contrast. To enable observations on fainter targets and increase stability on brighter ones, one of the upgrades is to the adaptive optics system. The current Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (WFS) is being replaced by a pyramid WFS with an low-noise electron multiplying CCD (EMCCD). EMCCDs are detectors capable of counting single photon events at high speed and high sensitivity. In this work, we characterize the performance of the HNü 240 EMCCD from Nüvü Cameras, which was custom-built for GPI 2.0. The HNü 240 EMCCD's characteristics make it well suited for extreme AO: it has low dark current ($<$ 0.01 e-/pix/fr), low readout noise (0.1 e-/pix/fr at a gain of 5000), high quantum efficiency ( 90% at wavelengths from 600-800 nm; 70% from 800-900 nm), and fast readout (up to 3000 fps full frame). Here we present test results on the EMCCD's noise contributors, such as the readout noise, pixel-to-pixel variability and CCD bias. We also tested the linearity and EM gain calibration of the detector. All camera tests were conducted before its integration into the GPI 2.0 PWFS system.
In typical adaptive optics applications, the atmospheric residual turbulence affects the wavefront sensor response decreasing its sensitivity. On the other hand, wavefront sensors are generally calibrated in diffraction limited condition, and, so, the interaction matrix sensitivity differs from the closed loop one. The ratio between the two sensitivities, that we will call the sensitivity loss factor, has to be estimated to retrieve a well-calibrated measurement. The spots size measurement could give a good estimation, but it is limited to systems with spots well sampled and uniform across the pupil. We present an algorithm to estimate sensitivity loss factor from closed loop data, based on the known parameters of the closed loop transfer functions. Here we preferred for simplicity the Shack-Hartmann WFS, but the algorithm we propose can be extended to other WFSs.
Context. The diffusion of adaptive optics systems in astronomical instrumentation for large ground-based telescopes is rapidly increasing and the pyramid wavefront sensor is replacing the Shack-Hartmann as the standard solution for single conjugate adaptive optics systems. The pyramid wavefront sensor is typically used with a tip-tilt modulation to increase the linearity range of the sensor, but the non-modulated case is interesting because it maximizes the sensor sensitivity. The latter case is generally avoided for the reduced linearity range that prevents robust operation in the presence of atmospheric turbulence. Aims. We aim to solve part of the issues of the non-modulated pyramid wavefront sensor by reducing the model error in the interaction matrix. We linearize the sensor response in the working conditions without extending the sensor linearity range. Methods. We developed a new calibration approach to model the response of pyramid wave front sensor in partial correction, whereby the working conditions in the presence of residual turbulence are considered. Results. We use in simulations to show how the new calibration approach allows for the pyramid wave front sensor without modulation to be used to sense and correct atmospheric turbulence and we discuss when this case is preferable over the modulated case.
Since 2005 ESO has been working with its community and industry to develop an extremely large optical/infrared telescope. ESO's Extremely Large Telescope, or ELT for short, is a revolutionary ground-based telescope that will have a 39-metre main mirror and will be the largest visible and infrared light telescope in the world. To address specific topics that are needed for the science operations and calibrations of the telescope, thirteen specific working groups were created to coordinate the effort between ESO, the instrument consortia, and the wider community. We describe here the goals of these working groups as well as their achievements so far.
In the last few years the concept of an active space telescope has been greatly developed, to meet demanding requirements with a substantial reduction of tolerances, risks and costs. This is the frame of the LATT project (an ESA TRP) and its follow-up SPLATT (an INAF funded R&D project). Within the SPLATT activities, we outline a novel approach and investigate, both via simulations and in the optical laboratory, two main elements: an active segmented primary with contactless actuators and a pyramid wavefront sensor (PWFS) to drive the correction chain. The key point is the synergy between them: the sensitivity of the PWFS and the intrinsic stability of a contactless-actuated mirror segment. Voice-coil, contactless actuators are in facts a natural decoupling layer between the payload and the optical surface and can suppress the high frequency vibration as we verified in the lab. We subjected a 40 cm diameter prototype with 19 actuators to an externally injected vibration spectrum; we then measured optically the reduction of vibrations when the optical surface is floating controlled by the actuators, thus validating the concept at the first stage of the design. The PWFS, which is largely adopted on ground-based telescope, is a pupil-conjugated sensor and offers a user-selectable sampling and capture range, in order to match different use cases; it is also more sensitive than Shack-Hartmann sensor especially at the low-mid spatial scales. We run a set of numerical simulations with the PWFS measuring the misalignment and phase steps of a JWST-like primary mirrors: we investigated the PWFS sensitivity in the sub-nanometer regime in presence of photon and detector noise, and with guide star magnitudes in the range 8 to 14. In the paper we discuss the outcomes of the project and present a possible roadmap for further developments.
The future upgrade of Keck II telescope's adaptive optics system will include a pyramid wavefront sensor working in the near-infrared (J and H band). It will benefit from the recently developed avalanche photodiode arrays, specifically the SAPHIRA (Selex) array, which provides a low noise ($<$ 1 e- at high frame rates). The system will either work with a natural guide star (NGS) in a single conjugated adaptive optics system, or in a laser guide star (LGS) mode. In this case, the pyramid would be used as a low-order sensor only. We report on a study of the pyramid sensor's performance via end-to-end simulations, applied to Keck's specific case. We present the expected Strehl ratio with optimized configurations in NGS mode, and the expected residual on low orders in LGS mode. In the latter case, we also compare the pyramid to LIFT, a focal-plane sensor, demonstrating the ability of LIFT to provide a gain of about 2 magnitudes for low-order sensing.
Current state-of-the-art adaptive optics (AO) provides ground-based, diffraction-limited observations with high Strehl ratios (SR). However, a detailed knowledge of the point spread function (PSF) is required to fully exploit the scientific potential of these data. This is even more crucial for the next generation AO instruments that will equip 30-meter class telescopes, as the characterization of the PSF will be mandatory to fulfill the planned scientific requirements. For this reason, there is a growing interest in developing tools that accurately reconstruct the observed PSF of AO systems, the so-called PSF reconstruction. In this context, a PSF-R service is a planned deliverable for the MICADO@ELT instrument and our group is in charge of its development. In the case of MICADO, a blind PSF-R approach is being pursued to have the widest applicability to science cases. This means that the PSF is reconstructed without extracting information from the science data, relying only on telemetry and calibrations. While our PSF-R algorithm is currently being developed, its implementation is mature enough to test performances with actual observations. In this presentation we will discuss the reliability of our reconstructed PSFs and the uncertainties introduced in the measurements of scientific quantities for bright, on-axis observations taken with the SOUL+LUCI instrument of the LBT. This is the first application of our algorithm to real data. It demonstrates its readiness level and paves the way to further testing. Our PSF-R algorithm is able to reconstruct the SR and full-width at half maximum of the observed PSFs with errors smaller than 2% and 4.5%, respectively. We carried out the scientific evaluation of the obtained reconstructed PSFs thanks to a dedicated set of simulated observations of an ideal science case.
The astronomical applications greatly benefit from the knowledge of the instrument PSF. We describe the PSF Reconstruction algorithm developed for the LBT LUCI instrument assisted by the SOUL SCAO module. The reconstruction procedure considers only synchronous wavefront sensor telemetry data and a few asynchronous calibrations. We do not compute the Optical Transfer Function and corresponding filters. We compute instead a temporal series of wavefront maps and for each of these the corresponding instantaneous PSF. We tested the algorithm both in laboratory arrangement and in the nighttime for different SOUL configurations, adapting it to the guide star magnitudes and seeing conditions. We nick-named it "BRUTE", Blind Reconstruction Using TElemetry, also recalling the one-to-one approach, one slope-to one instantaneous PSF the algorithm applies.
This paper presents the status of an ongoing project aimed at developing a PSF reconstruction software for adaptive optics (AO) observations. In particular, we test for the first time the implementation of pyramid wave-front sensor data on our algorithms. As a first step in assessing its reliability, we applied the software to bright, on-axis, point-like sources using two independent sets of observations, acquired with the single-conjugated AO upgrade for the Large Binocular Telescope. Using only telemetry data, we reconstructed the PSF by carefully calibrating the instrument response. The accuracy of the results has been first evaluated using the classical metric: specifically, the reconstructed PSFs differ from the observed ones by less than 2% in Strehl ratio and 4.5% in full-width at half maximum. Moreover, the recovered encircled energy associated with the PSF core is accurate at 4% level in the worst case. The accuracy of the reconstructed PSFs has then been evaluated by considering an idealized scientific test-case consisting in the measurements of the morphological parameters of a compact galaxy. In the future, our project will include the analysis of anisoplanatism, low SNR regimes, and the application to multi-conjugated AO observations.
Multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) will assist a new era of ground-based astronomical observations with the extremely large telescopes and the Very Large Telescope. High precision relative astrometry is among the main science drivers of these systems and challenging requirements have been set for the astrometric measurements. A clear understanding of the astrometric error budget is needed and the impact of the MCAO correction has to be taken into account. In this context, we propose an analytical formulation to estimate the residual phase produced by an MCAO correction in any direction of the scientific field of view. The residual phase, computed in the temporal frequency domain, allows to consider the temporal filtering of the turbulent phase from the MCAO loop and to extract the temporal spectrum of the residuals, as well as to include other temporal effects such as the scientific integration time. The formulation is kept general and allows to consider specific frameworks by setting the telescope diameter, the turbulence profile, the guide stars constellation, the deformable mirrors configuration, the modes sensed and corrected and the tomographic reconstruction algorithm. The formalism is presented for both a closed loop and a pseudo-open loop control. We use our results to investigate the effect of tip-tilt residuals on MCAO-assisted astrometric observations. We derive an expression for the differential tilt jitter power spectrum that also includes the dependence on the scientific exposure time. Finally, we investigate the contribution of the differential tilt jitter error on the future astrometric observations with MAVIS and MAORY.
A new era of ground-based observations, either in the infrared with the next-generation of 25-40m extremely large telescopes or in the visible with the 8m Very Large Telescope, is going to be assisted by multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) to restore the unprecedented resolutions potentially available for these systems in absence of atmospheric turbulence. Astrometry is one of the main science drivers, as MCAO can provide good quality and uniform correction over wide field of views ($\sim$ 1 arcmin) and offer a large number of reference sources with high image quality. The requirements have been set to very high precisions on the differential astrometry (e.g. 50$μ$as for MICADO/MORFEO - formerly known as MAORY - at the Extremely Large Telescope) and an accurate analysis of the astrometric error budget is needed. In this context, we present an analysis of the impact of MCAO atmospheric tip-tilt residuals on relative astrometry. We focus on the effects of the scientific integration time on tip-tilt residuals, that we model through the temporal transfer function of the exposure. We define intra- and inter-exposure tip-tilt residuals that we use in the estimation of the centroiding error and the differential tilt jitter error within the astrometric error budget. As a case study, we apply our results in the context of the MORFEO astrometric error budget.
In the context of adaptive optics for astronomy, one can rely on the statistics of the turbulent phase to assess a part of the system's performance. Temporal statistics with one source and spatial statistics with two sources are well-known and are widely used for classical adaptive optics systems. A more general framework, including both spatial and temporal statistics, can be useful for the analysis of the existing systems and to support the design of the future ones. In this paper, we propose an expression of the temporal cross power spectral densities of the turbulent phases in two distinct beams, that is from two different sources to two different apertures. We either consider the phase as it is, without piston, or as its decomposition on Zernike modes. The general formulas allow to cover a wide variety of configurations, from single-aperture to interferometric telescopes equipped with adaptive optics, with the possibility to consider apertures of different sizes and/or sources at a finite distance. The presented approach should lead to similar results with respect to existing methods in the Fourier domain, but it is focused on temporal frequencies rather than spatial ones, which might be convenient for some aspects such as control optimization. To illustrate this framework with a simple application, we demonstrate that the wavefront residual due to the anisoplanatism error in a single-conjugated adaptive optics system is overestimated when it is computed from covariances without taking into account the temporal filtering of the adaptive optics loop. We also show this overestimation in the case of a small-baseline interferometer, for which the two beams are significantly correlated.
Laser Guide Star (LGS) Shack-Hartmann (SH) wavefront sensors for next generation Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) require low-noise, large format (about 1Mpx), fast detectors to match the need for a large number of subapertures and a good sampling of the very elongated spots. One path envisaged to fulfill this need has been the adoption of CMOS detectors with a rolling shutter read-out scheme, that allows low read-out noise and fast readout time at the cost of image distortion due to the detector rows exposed in different moments. In this work we analyze the impact of the rolling shutter read-out scheme when used for LGS SH wavefront sensing of the Multiconjugate adaptive Optic Relay For ELT Observations (MORFEO, formerly known as MAORY) for ESO ELT; in particular, we focus on the impact on the adaptive optics correction of the distortion-induced aberrations created by the rolling exposure in the case of fast varying aberrations, like the ones coming from the LGS tilt jitter due to the up-link propagation of laser beams. We show that the LGS jitter-induced aberration for MORFEO can be as large as 100nm rms and we discuss possible mitigation strategies.
The Multiconjugate adaptive Optic Relay For ELT Observations (MORFEO, formerly known as MAORY) is the adaptive optics (AO) module for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) aimed at providing a 1 arcmin corrected field to the Multi-AO Imaging CamerA for Deep Observations (MICADO) and to a future client instrument. It should provide resolution close to the diffraction limit on a large portion of the sky and in a wide range of atmospheric conditions. Its ability to provide a flat wavefront must face the known aspect of the atmospheric turbulence and telescope environment, but also the final characteristic of a telescope still to be fully developed and built. In this work we focused on issues related to the segmentation of the telescope pupil (like low wind effect, residual phasing error at handover and control related issues), that could limit the system performance. MORFEO currently does not foresee a dedicated sensor to measure the phase step between adjacent mirror segments: in this work we study the possibility to use the low order wavefront sensors designed to sense and correct tip-tilt and focus as phasing sensors thanks to the linearized focal-plane technique (LIFT).
The MCAO Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph (MAVIS) is a new visible instrument for ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT). Its Adaptive Optics Module (AOM) must provide extreme adaptive optics correction level at low galactic latitude and high sky coverage at the galactic pole on the FoV of 30arcsec of its 4k x 4k optical imager and on its monolithic Integral Field Unit, thanks to 3 deformable mirrors (DM), 8 Laser Guide Stars (LGS), up to 3 Natural Guide Stars (NGS) and 11 Wave Front Sensors (WFS). A careful performance estimation is required to drive the design of this module and to assess the fulfillment of the system and subsystems requirements. Here we present the work done on this topic during the last year: we updated the system parameters to account for the phase B design and for more realistic conditions, and we produced a set of results from analytical and end-to-end simulations that should give a as complete as possible view on the performance of the system.