Optimization of MCAO performances: experimental results on ONERA laboratory MCAO bench

Classic Adaptive Optics (AO) is now a proven technique to correct turbulence on earth based astronomical telescopes. The corrected field of view is however limited by the anisoplanatism effect. Multi-Conjugate AO (MCAO) aims at providing a wide field of view correction through the use of several deformable mirrors and of multi-guide-star wavefront sensing. However the performance optimization of such complex systems raises new questions in terms of calibration and control. We present our current developments on performance optimization of MCAO systems. We show that performance can be significantly improved with tomographic control based on Linear Quadratic Gaussian control, compared with more standard methods. An experimental demonstration of this new approach is going to be implemented on HOMER, the recent bench developed at ONERA devoted to MCAO laboratory research. We present here results in closed-loop in AO, GLAO and MCAO with an integrator control. This bench implements two deformable mirrors and a wide field Shack-Hartman wavefront sensor.