LINC-NIRVANA: the single arm MCAO experiment

LINC-NIRVANA is an imaging interferometer for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) and will make use of multi-conjugated adaptive optics (MCAO) with two 349 actuators deformable mirrors (DM), two 672 actuator deformable secondary mirrors and a total of 4 wavefront sensors (WFS) by using 8 or 12 natural guide stars each. The goal of the MCAO is to increase sky coverage and achieve a medium Strehl-ratio over the 2 arcmin field of view. To test the concepts and prototypes, a laboratory setup of one MCAO arm is being built. We present the layout of the MCAO prototype, planned and accomplished tests, especially for the used Xinetics DMs, and a possible setup for a test on sky with an existing 8m class telescope.

[1]  Roberto Ragazzoni,et al.  Layer-Oriented on paper, laboratory, and soon on the sky , 2004, Extremely Large Telescopes.

[2]  Roberto Ragazzoni,et al.  LINC-NIRVANA: a Fizeau beam combiner for the large binocular telescope , 2003, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[3]  Roberto Ragazzoni,et al.  MAD the ESO multi-conjugate adaptive optics demonstrator , 2003, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[4]  Roberto Ragazzoni,et al.  LINC-NIRVANA: mechanical challanges of the MCAO wavefront sensor , 2004, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[5]  Roberto Ragazzoni,et al.  Arbitrarily Small Pupils in Layer‐Oriented Multi‐Conjugate Adaptive Optics , 2005 .

[6]  John M. Hill,et al.  Large Binocular Telescope project , 2000, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[7]  Roberto Ragazzoni,et al.  UML modeling of the LINC-NIRVANA control software , 2004, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[8]  Roberto Ragazzoni,et al.  A visible MCAO channel for NIRVANA at the LBT , 2003, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[9]  Marcel Carbillet,et al.  Restoration of interferometric images II. The case-study of the Large Binocular Telescope , 2002 .

[10]  R. Ragazzoni.  Pupil plane wavefront sensing with an oscillating prism , 1996 .

[11]  John M. Hill,et al.  Wavefront sensing and guiding units for the Large Binocular Telescope , 2000, Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation.

[12]  Karl Wagner,et al.  Next-generation deformable mirror electronics , 2004, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.