Wide field adaptive optics laboratory demonstration with closed-loop tomographic control

Abstract

HOMER, the new bench developed at ONERA devoted to wide field adaptive optics (WFAO) laboratory research, has allowed the first experimental validations of multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) and laser tomography adaptive optics (LTAO) concepts with a linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control approach. Results obtained in LTAO in closed loop show the significant gain in performance brought by LQG control, which allows tomographic reconstruction. We present a calibration and model identification strategy. Experimental results are shown to be consistent with end-to-end simulations. These results are very encouraging and demonstrate robustness of performance with respect to inevitable experimental uncertainties. They represent a first step for the study of very large telescope (VLT) and extremely large telescopes (ELT) instruments.