After 16 years of on-sky operation, Subaru Telescope’s facility adaptive optics AO188 is getting several major upgrades to become the extreme-AO AO3000 (3000 actuators in the pupil compared to 188 previously). AO3000 will provide high-Strehl images for several instruments from visible to mid-infrared, notably the Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (IRCS), and the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO). For this upgrade, the original 188-element deformable mirror (DM) will be replaced with ALPAO’s 64 × 64 DM. The visible wavefront sensor will also be upgraded at a later date, but in the meantime we are adding a near-infrared Wavefront Sensor (NIR WFS), using either a double roof prism pyramid mode or a focal plane WFS mode. This new wavefront sensor will use for the first time First Light’s C-RED ONE camera, allowing for a full control of the 64 × 64 DM at up to 1.6 kHz. One of the challenges is the use of non-destructive reads and a rolling shutter with the modulated pyramid. This upgrade will be particularly exciting for SCExAO, since the extreme-AO loop will focus more on creating high-contrast dark zones instead of correcting large atmospheric residuals. It will be the first time two extreme-AO loops will be combined on the same telescope. Finally, the setup AO3000+SCExAO+IRCS will serve as a perfect demonstrator for the Thirty Meter Telescope’s Planetary Systems Imager (TMT-PSI). We will present here the design, integration and testing of AO3000, and show the first on-sky results.
ULTIMATE-Subaru is an on-going project at the Subaru Telescope for the next-generation wide-field infrared astronomy. The adaptive secondary mirror optically conjugated close to the ground level, is an important subsystem of ground-layer adaptive optics. Because the ground-layer is the dominant component in the total atmospheric turbulence existing near the aperture of the telescope, the correction of the ground-layer turbulence improves the seeing size over a wide field-of-view. The design together with the plan of the Subaru ASM including the interface to the telescope and the calibration strategy is presented.
The Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) instrument is a high-contrast imaging system installed at the 8-m Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, Hawaii. Due to its unique evolving design, SCExAO is both an instrument open for use by the international scientific community, and a testbed validating new technologies, which are critical to future high-contrast imagers on Giant Segmented Mirror Telescopes (GSMTs). Through multiple international collaborations over the years, SCExAO was able to test the most advanced technologies in wavefront sensors, real-time control with GPUs, low-noise high frame rate detectors in the visible and infrared, starlight suppression techniques or photonics technologies. Tools and interfaces were put in place to encourage collaborators to implement their own hardware and algorithms, and test them on-site or remotely, in laboratory conditions or on-sky. We are now commissioning broadband coronagraphs, the Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID) Exoplanet Camera (MEC) for high-speed speckle control, as well as a C-RED ONE camera for both polarization differential imaging and IR wavefront sensing. New wavefront control algorithms are also being tested, such as predictive control, multi-camera machine learning sensor fusion, and focal plane wavefront control. We present the status of the SCExAO instrument, with an emphasis on current collaborations and recent technology demonstrations. We also describe upgrades planned for the next few years, which will evolve SCExAO —and the whole suite of instruments on the IR Nasmyth platform of the Subaru Telescope— to become a system-level demonstrator of the Planetary Systems Imager (PSI), the high-contrast instrument for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).
Currently, two AO systems are operated at Subaru Telescope: AO188, which is a facility AO system, and SCExAO, which is a PI-type ExAO system operated behind AO188. In the next 5 year, large-scale upgrades are performed on AO188 for improving the AO performance and operation of AO188 and SCExAO and for the technical demonstration toward the future wide-field ULTIMATE-Subaru GLAO system at Subaru and an ExAO system at TMT, PSI. We are planning to upgrade the real-time control system, the LGS system, and bimorph DM. Also, a new NIR WFS, a LTAO WFS unit, and a beam-switching system will be installed into the Nasmyth IR platform. The installation of the LTAO WFS unit is a part of the ULTIMATE-START project, which implement a LTAO mode into AO188 and demonstrates technologies for the ULTIMATE-Subaru GLAO system. ULTIMATE-Subaru project aims at developing a next-generation, wide-field GLAO system and wide-field NIR instruments for Subaru Telescope, whose first light will be in FY2025.
ULTIMATE-Subaru is a next large facility instrument project at Subaru telescope. We will develop a 14x14 sq. arcmin wide-field near-infrared (NIR) imager and a multi-object spectrograph with the aid of a ground- layer adaptive optics system (GLAO), which will uniformly improve the seeing by a factor of 2 over a wide field of view up to ~20 arcmin in diameter. We have developed system modeling of the GLAO and wide-field NIR instruments to define the system level requirements flow down from science cases and derive the system performance budgets based on the GLAO end-to-end numerical simulation and optical system models of the telescope and wide-field NIR science instruments. In this paper, we describe the system performance modeling of ULTIMATE-Subaru and present an overview of the requirements flow down.
ULTIMATE-Subaru is a next large facility instrument project at Subaru telescope. We will develop a 14x14 arcmin2 wide-field near-infrared (1.0-2.5μm) imager and a multi-object spectrograph with the aid of a ground- layer adaptive optics system (GLAO), which will uniformly improve the seeing by a factor of 2 over a wide field of view up to ~20 arcmin in diameter. The expected spatial resolution by the GLAO correction is about 0.2 arcsec FWHM in K-band under moderate seeing conditions at Subaru telescope. ULTIMATE-Subaru will provide a unique capability to realize wide-field and high spatial resolution survey observations in near infrared in the era of TMT. In this paper, we introduce the project overview including the GLAO and near-infrared instrument conceptual design. We also describe the future wide-field strategy at Subaru telescope with ULTIMATE-Subaru together with HSC and PFS.
The AO188 Single Conjugate facility AO system at Subaru Telescope delivers diffraction-limited images in near-IR in natural and laser guide star modes. We have recently started a major upgrade of AO188 to fulfill the high performance requirements of its downstream instruments, including the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme-AO. The first phase of this upgrade started in 2017 with the integration of a new real time computer (RTC) and real time system (RTS) CACAO(https://github.com/CACAO-org/CACAO), an open-source real-time software for adaptive optics developed collaboratively and used extensively by the SCExAO instrument. This major upgrade will enable loop optimization, predictive control and include diagnosis tools, therefore improving the performance and stability of AO188 and its downstream instrument module. This paper introduces the architecture of the new RTS describing the different steps we followed to adapt CACAO to our AO interfaces and aging hardware, in preparation of our first engineering tests on-sky achieved successfully on July 23rd 2018.
The compute and control for adaptive optics (cacao) package is an open-source modular software environment for real-time control of modern adaptive optics system. By leveraging many-core CPU and GPU hardware, it can scale up to meet the demanding computing requirements of current and future high frame rate, high actuator count adaptive optics (AO) systems. cacao’s modular design enables both simple/barebone operation, and complex full-featured AO control systems. cacao’s design is centered on data streams that hold real-time data in shared memory along with a synchronization mechanism for computing processes. Users and programmers can add additional features by coding modules that interact with cacao’s data stream format. We describe cacao’s architecture and its design approach. We show that accurate timing knowledge is key to many of cacao’s advanced operation modes. We discuss current and future development priorities, including support for machine learning to provide real-time optimization of complex AO systems.
The Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) instrument is an extremely modular high- contrast instrument installed on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii. SCExAO has a dual purpose. Its position in the northern hemisphere on a 8-meter telescope makes it a prime instrument for the detection and characterization of exoplanets and stellar environments over a large portion of the sky. In addition, SCExAO’s unique design makes it the ideal instrument to test innovative technologies and algorithms quickly in a laboratory setup and subsequently deploy them on-sky. SCExAO benefits from a first stage of wavefront correction with the facility adaptive optics AO188, and splits the 600-2400 nm spectrum towards a variety of modules, in visible and near infrared, optimized for a large range of science cases. The integral field spectrograph CHARIS, with its J, H or K-band high-resolution mode or its broadband low-resolution mode, makes SCExAO a prime instrument for exoplanet detection and characterization. Here we report on the recent developments and scientific results of the SCExAO instrument. Recent upgrades were performed on a number of modules, like the visible polarimetric module VAMPIRES, the high-performance infrared coronagraphs, various wavefront control algorithms, as well as the real-time controller of AO188. The newest addition is the 20k-pixel Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKIDS) Exoplanet Camera (MEC) that will allow for previously unexplored science and technology developments. MEC, coupled with novel photon-counting speckle control, brings SCExAO closer to the final design of future high-contrast instruments optimized for Giant Segmented Mirror Telescopes (GSMTs).
We report the current status of the laser guide star upgrade at Subaru Telescope with a new, more powerful TOPTICA/MPBC laser. While we recycle many of our existing components, such as laser launch telescope, we need to design a new mirror-based laser relay system to replace the current fiber-based relay to accommodate the high power beam. The laser unit has been delivered to Subaru office in March 2018 and installed in a testing lab in June 2018. We describe the preliminary design and its requirements and report future plans. This upgrade will not only improve our current adaptive optics system but also be the first step toward the future laser tomography and ground layer adaptive optics system at Subaru Telescope.
Exoplanet imaging requires excellent wavefront correction and calibration. At the Subaru telescope this is achieved us- ing the 188-element facility adaptive optics system(AO188) feeding the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) instrument; a multipurpose instrument built to deliver high contrast images of planets and disks around nearby stars. AO188 offers coarse correction while SCExAO performs fine correction and calibration of 1000 modes. The full system achieves 90%Strehl Ratio in H-band and diffraction limited images. A new Real Time Computer allowing higher performance between SCExAO and AO188 is currently implemented. Future upgrades will include a new Pyramid Wavefront Sensor and (64x64) DM to achieve extreme AO correction inside AO188. We are progressing in the development of predictive control and sensor fusion algorithms across the system to improve performance and calibration. With the new upgrades, SCExAO will be able to image giant planets in reflected light with Subaru and validate technologies necessary to image habitable Earth-like planets with the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).
We report on the conceptual design study done for the Ground Layer Adaptive Optics system of the ULTIMATE-Subaru project. This is an ambitious instrument project, providing GLAO correction in a square field of view of 14 arcmin on a side, aiming to deliver improved seeing at the near infrared wavelength. Its client instruments are an imager and multi-IFU spectrograph at Cassegrain and a Multi-Object spectrograph at Nasmyth. In this paper, we introduce the ULTIMATE-Subaru project overview and its science case and report the results of the GLAO performance prediction based on the numerical simulation and conceptual design of the wavefront sensor system.
This paper presents the overview of on-going and future adaptive optics (AO) activities at the Subaru telescope on the top of Maunakea in Hawaii. Currently, two AO systems are running at the Subaru telescope: AO188, a facility single-conjugate AO system with a bimorph deformable mirror and a curvature wavefront sensor with 188 elements, and SCExAO, an additional extreme AO system operating behind AO188 and specialized for exoplanet sciences. We recently started AO188 upgrade project to improve its performance for the next 5-10 years, which will also help improving SCExAO performance. These upgrades are in line with a development for the ULTIMATE-Subaru ground layer AO system.
Contrast limit for the direct imaging of extrasolar planets from ground based adaptive optics (AO) observations is set by the presence of static and slow-varying aberrations in the optical path that lead to the science instrument. To complement the otherwise highly successful angular differential imaging (ADI) technique toward small angular separation, we propose to employ additional wavefront control to modulate the diffraction. This flexible approach introduces enough diversity to discriminate genuine structures of the observed target from spurious diffraction features in the image. One possible implementation of such form of coherence differential imaging (CDI) is a speckle nulling algorithm that iteratively suppresses diffraction features inside a region constrained by the number of active elements of the deformable mirror modulating the wavefront, and the coronagraph. This paper presents on-sky results obtained with this approach, on the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme AO (SCExAO) instrument.
The Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) instrument is one of a handful of extreme adaptive
optics systems set to come online in 2014. The extreme adaptive optics correction is realized by a combination of precise
wavefront sensing via a non-modulated pyramid wavefront sensor and a 2000 element deformable mirror. This system
has recently begun on-sky commissioning and was operated in closed loop for several minutes at a time with a loop
speed of 800 Hz, on ~150 modes. Further suppression of quasi-static speckles is possible via a process called "speckle
nulling" which can create a dark hole in a portion of the frame allowing for an enhancement in contrast, and has been
successfully tested on-sky.
In addition to the wavefront correction there are a suite of coronagraphs on board to null out the host star which include
the phase induced amplitude apodization (PIAA), the vector vortex, 8 octant phase mask, 4 quadrant phase mask and
shaped pupil versions which operate in the NIR (y-K bands). The PIAA and vector vortex will allow for high contrast
imaging down to an angular separation of 1 λ/D to be reached; a factor of 3 closer in than other extreme AO systems.
Making use of the left over visible light not used by the wavefront sensor is VAMPIRES and FIRST. These modules are
based on aperture masking interferometry and allow for sub-diffraction limited imaging with moderate contrasts of
~100-1000:1. Both modules have undergone initial testing on-sky and are set to be fully commissioned by the end of
2014.
Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) deformable mirrors (DMs) are widely utilized in astronomical Adaptive
Optics (AO) instrumentation. High precision open-loop control of MEMS DMs has been achieved by developing
a high accuracy DM model, the Fast Iterative Algorithm (FIA), a physics-based model allowing precise
control of the DM shape. Accurate open-loop control is particularly critical for the wavefront control of High-
Contrast Imaging (HCI) instruments to create a dark hole area free of most slow and quasi-static speckles which
remain the limiting factor for direct detection and imaging of exoplanets. The Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme
Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) system is one of these high contrast imaging instruments and uses a 1024-actuator
MEMS deformable mirror (DM) both in closed-loop and open-loop. The DM is used to modulate speckles in
order to distinguish (i) speckles due to static and slow-varying residual aberrations from (ii) speckles due to
genuine structures, such as exoplanets. The FIA has been fully integrated into the SCExAO wavefront control
software and we report the FIA’s performance for the control of speckles in the focal plane.
In 2009 our group started the integration of the SCExAO project, a highly flexible, open platform for high
contrast imaging at the highest angular resolution, inserted between the coronagraphic imaging camera HiCIAO
and the 188-actuator AO system of Subaru. In its first version, SCExAO combines a MEMS-based wavefront
control system feeding a high performance PIAA-based coronagraph. This paper presents some of the images
obtained during the first engineering observations conducted with SCExAO in 2011: diffraction limited imaging
in the visible as well as PIAA coronagraphy in the near infrared; along with the wavefront control strategies to
be tested on sky during the next round of SCExAO observations, scheduled in the Fall 2012.
ELTs will offer angular resolution around 10mas in the near-IR and unprecedented sensitivity. While direct imaging of
Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars will stay out of reach of ELTs, we show that habitable planets around nearby
M-type main sequence stars can be directly imaged. For about 300 nearby M dwarfs, the angular separation at maximum
elongation is at or beyond 1 ë/D in the near-IR for an ELT. The planet to star contrast is 1e-7 to 1e-8, similar to what the
upcoming generation of Extreme-AO systems will achieve on 8-m telescopes, and the potential planets are sufficiently
bright for near-IR spectroscopy. We show that the technological solutions required to achieve this goal exist. For
example, the PIAACMC coronagraph can deliver full starlight rejection, 100% throughput and sub-ë/D IWA for the EELT,
GMT and TMT pupils. A closely related coronagraph is part of SCExAO on Subaru. We conclude that large
ground-based telescopes will acquire the first high quality spectra of habitable planets orbiting M-type stars, while future
space mission(s) will later target F-G-K type stars.
The Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) system uses advanced coronagraphic technique
for high contrast imaging of exoplanets and disks as close as 1 lambda/D from the host star. In addition
to unusual optics, achieving high contrast at this small angular separation requires a wavefront sensing and
control architecture which is optimized for exquisite control and calibration of low order aberrations. The
SCExAO system was thus designed to include the wavefront sensors required for bias-free high sensitivity and
high speed wavefront measurements. Information is combined from two infrared wavefront sensors and a fast
visible wavefront sensors to drive a single MEMS type deformable mirror mounted on a tip-tilt mount. The
wavefront sensing and control architecture is highly integrated with the coronagraph system.
In 2009 our group started the integration of the SCExAO project, a highly flexible, open platform for high
contrast imaging at the highest angular resolution, inserted between the coronagraphic imaging camera HiCIAO
and the 188-actuator AO system of Subaru. In its first version, SCExAO combines a MEMS-based wavefront
control system feeding a high performance PIAA-based coronagraph. It also includes a coronagraphic low-order
wavefront sensor, a non-redundant aperture mask and a visible imaging mode, all of them designed to take full
advantage of the angular resolution that an 8-meter telescope has to offer. SCExAO is currently undergoing
commissioning, and this paper presents the first on-sky results acquired in August 2011, using together Subaru's
AO system, SCExAO and HiCIAO.
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