Author: Conan, R.
Paper Title Page
MOPGF071 Sodium Laser Guide Star Emulation 255
 
  • I.A. Price
    Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Australian National University, Weston Creek, Australia
  • R. Conan
    GMTO Corporation, Pasadena, USA
  
  In the era of ex­tremely large tele­scopes (ELT) an adap­tive op­tics (AO) sys­tem with ar­ti­fi­cial guide stars is an es­sen­tial part of the op­tics be­tween the source and the in­stru­ment. For the Giant Mag­el­lan Tele­scope these guide stars are formed by stim­u­lat­ing emis­sion from Sodium atoms in the at­mos­phere with lasers launched from the side of the tele­scope. More­over, they are re­solved by the adap­tive op­tics sys­tem so Shack-Hart­mann wave­front sen­sors record elon­gated spots. Cost ef­fec­tive proof-of-con­cept sys­tems for in­ves­ti­gat­ing con­trol al­go­rithms must be built for de­ploy­ment in the lab or on small tele­scopes. We pre­sent a hard­ware and soft­ware sys­tem that mim­ics the prop­a­ga­tion of a sin­gle laser guide star (LGS) through the Earth's at­mos­phere and the op­tics of the Giant Mag­el­lan Tele­scope, using source mo­tion and bright­ness mod­u­la­tion to sim­u­late the source ex­ten­sion. A ser­vice ori­ented ar­chi­tec­ture al­lows adap­tive op­tics sci­en­tists to con­struct im­ages from dif­fer­ent LGS as­ter­isms and build non-real-time closed-loop con­trol sys­tems in high-level lan­guages.  
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