AO3000 at Subaru: combining for the first time a NIR WFS using First Light's C-RED ONE and ALPAO's 64x64 DM
Abstract
After 16 years of on-sky operation, Subaru Telescope's facility adaptive optics AO188 is getting several major upgrades to become the extreme-AO AO3000 (3000 actuators in the pupil compared to 188 previously). AO3000 will provide high-Strehl images for several instruments from visible to mid-infrared, notably the Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (IRCS), and the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO). For this upgrade, the original 188-element deformable mirror (DM) will be replaced with ALPAO's 64 × 64 DM. The visible wavefront sensor will also be upgraded at a later date, but in the meantime we are adding a near-infrared Wavefront Sensor (NIR WFS), using either a double roof prism pyramid mode or a focal plane WFS mode. This new wavefront sensor will use for the first time First Light's C-RED ONE camera, allowing for a full control of the 64 × 64 DM at up to 1.6 kHz. One of the challenges is the use of non-destructive reads and a rolling shutter with the modulated pyramid. This upgrade will be particularly exciting for SCExAO, since the extreme-AO loop will focus more on creating high-contrast dark zones instead of correcting large atmospheric residuals. It will be the first time two extreme-AO loops will be combined on the same telescope. Finally, the setup AO3000+SCExAO+IRCS will serve as a perfect demonstrator for the Thirty Meter Telescope's Planetary Systems Imager (TMT-PSI). We will present here the design, integration and testing of AO3000, and show the first on-sky results.
- Publication:
-
Adaptive Optics Systems VIII
- Pub Date:
- August 2022
- DOI:
- 10.1117/12.2630634
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2209.12981
- Bibcode:
- 2022SPIE12185E..33L
- Keywords:
-
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 14 pages, 12 figures, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes +Instrumentation, 2022, Montreal, Quebec, Canada