Authors

Michel Tallon, Clémentine Béchet, Isabelle Tallon-Bosc, Miska Le Louarn, Éric Thiébaut, Richard Clare, Enrico Marchetti

Affiliations

1, 3, 5: Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, France

2, 4, 6, 7: European Southern Observatory, Germany

Abstract

Adaptive optics (AO) on Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) must overcome the difficulty of solving a huge number of equations in real time, especially when atmospheric tomography is involved. This is particularly the case for multi-conjugate or multi-objects AO systems. The Fractal Iterative Method (FrIM) has been introduced as a fast iterative algorithm for minimum variance wavefront reconstruction and control on ELTs. In particular, it includes an accurate fast computation of turbulence priors by using the so-called fractal operator.

We present the first results obtained with FrIM in closed-loop in the context of atmospheric tomography. The method has been tested on Octopus, the end-to-end AO simulator at ESO, by considering MAORY, the multi-conjugate AO module planed for the E-ELT. This module aims at correcting a 2 arcmin field-of-view, by using 3 deformable mirrors, 6 Sodium laser guide stars, and 3 natural guide stars for low-order wavefront sensing.

We show the performance obtained in different conditions and analyze the effect of some parameters of FrIM, like the weight of the priors, or the number of conjugate gradient iterations for solving the reconstruction. We show how the duration of the simulations can be shortened on such a large aperture, with the introduction of artificial vibrations in the simulation. The results are also compared to a more classical approach using matrix-vector multiplication.