Miniaturized Shack-Hartmann Wavefront-Sensors for Starbugs

TL;DR

This paper presents a compact, lightweight Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor integrated with Starbug robots, enabling precise multi-object adaptive optics with potential applications in telescope field management.

Contribution

The development of a miniaturized wavefront sensor using polymer fibre bundles that can be multiplexed and integrated with Starbug robots for adaptive optics and other telescope applications.

Findings

Successful laboratory tests demonstrating the sensor's performance.

High fill factor and throughput of the polymer fibre bundles.

Potential for multiplexing multiple sensors with a single camera.

Abstract

The ability to position multiple miniaturized wavefront sensors precisely over large focal surfaces are advantageous to multi-object adaptive optics. The Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) has prototyped a compact and lightweight Shack-Hartmann wavefront-sensor that fits into a standard Starbug parallel fibre positioning robot. Each device makes use of a polymer coherent fibre imaging bundle to relay an image produced by a microlens array placed at the telescope focal plane to a re-imaging camera mounted elsewhere. The advantages of the polymer fibre bundle are its high-fill factor, high-throughput, low weight, and relatively low cost. Multiple devices can also be multiplexed to a single low-noise camera for cost efficiencies per wavefront sensor. The use of fibre bundles also opens the possibility of applications such as telescope field acquisition, guiding, and seeing monitors to be positioned by Starbugs. We present the design aspects, simulations and laboratory test results.