First on-sky SCAO validation of full LQG control with vibration mitigation on the CANARY pathfinder

Gaetano Sivo (1, 2, 3) , Caroline Kulcsár (1) , Jean-Marc Conan (2) , Henri-François Raynaud (1) , Eric Gendron (4) , Alastair Basden (5) , Fabrice Vidal (4) , Tim Morris (5) , Serge Meimon (2) , Cyril Petit (2) , Damien Gratadour (4) , Olivier Martin (4) , Zoltan Hubert (4) , Arnaud Sevin (4) , Denis Perret (4) , Fanny Chemla (6) , Gérard Rousset (4) , Nigel Dipper , Gordon Talbot , Eddy Younger , Richard M. Myers (5) , David Henry (7) , Stephen Todd (8) , David Atkinson (9) , Colin Dickson , Andy Longmore

1 Laboratoire Charles Fabry / Spim
2 ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab [Châtillon]
3 UP13 - Université Paris 13
4 LESIA - Laboratoire d'études spatiales et d'instrumentation en astrophysique
5 Department of Physics [Durham University]
6 GEPI - Galaxies, Etoiles, Physique, Instrumentation
7 IMS - Laboratoire de l'intégration, du matériau au système
8 Ageing Group, Centre for Public Health
9 Medicine Division

Adaptive optics provides real time correction of wavefront disturbances on ground based telescopes. Optimizing control and performance is a key issue for ever more demanding instruments on ever larger telescopes affected not only by atmospheric turbulence, but also by vibrations, windshake and tracking errors. Linear Quadratic Gaussian control achieves optimal correction when provided with a temporalmodel of the disturbance. We present in this paper the first on-sky results of a Kalman filter based LQG control with vibration mitigation on the CANARY instrument at the Nasmyth platform of the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope. The results demonstrate a clear improvement of performance for full LQG compared with standard integrator control, and assess the additional improvement brought by vibration filtering with a tip-tilt model identified from on-sky data, thus validating the strategy retained on the instrument SPHERE at the VLT.

Mots clés: Adaptive optics, Atmospheric turbulence, Optimal control, Atmospheric correction, Astronomical optics, Vibration analysis

Domaines: Instrumentation et méthodes pour l'astrophysique [astro-ph.IM]; Physique [physics]; Astrophysique [astro-ph]; Automatique / Robotique; Optique / photonique

Gaetano Sivo, Caroline Kulcsár, Jean-Marc Conan, Henri-François Raynaud, Eric Gendron, et al.. First on-sky SCAO validation of full LQG control with vibration mitigation on the CANARY pathfinder. Optics Express, 2014, 22 (19), pp.23565-23591. ⟨10.1364/OE.22.023565⟩. ⟨hal-01739389⟩