A bright, pulsed, guide star laser for very large telescopes

Jesper Munch; Murray Hamilton; David Hosken; Nikita Simakov; Peter Veitch

doi:10.1117/12.856821

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28 July 2010 A bright, pulsed, guide star laser for very large telescopes

Jesper Munch, Murray Hamilton, David Hosken, Nikita Simakov, Peter Veitch

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Proceedings Volume 7736, Adaptive Optics Systems II; 77361X (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.856821
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2010, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

We demonstrate for the first time the practical feasibility of a new sodium guide star laser with a pulsed burst output of sufficient energy at 589nm to be useful for current applications and readily scalable to meet future requirements. We describe complete experimental design verification results of the pulse burst laser concept, optimized to eliminate guide-star elongation issues and to meet all requirements for Multi Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) for future extremely large ground-based telescopes (ELTs). It makes use of sum frequency generation (SFG) of two, Q-switched, injection mode-locked, wavelength stabilized Nd:YAG lasers, producing a macro-micro, pulse-burst output which is optimized in power and bandwidth to maximize the fluorescence from the high altitude sodium layer.

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Jesper Munch, Murray Hamilton, David Hosken, Nikita Simakov, and Peter Veitch "A bright, pulsed, guide star laser for very large telescopes", Proc. SPIE 7736, Adaptive Optics Systems II, 77361X (28 July 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.856821

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