NFIRAOS First Facility AO System for the Thirty Meter Telescope

TL;DR

NFIRAOS is a sophisticated adaptive optics system for the Thirty Meter Telescope, featuring multi-conjugate correction, laser guide star and natural guide star modes, and innovative cooling and wavefront sensing technologies to enhance astronomical observations.

Contribution

This paper introduces NFIRAOS, the first AO system for TMT, detailing its design, operational modes, and recent advancements in acquisition, computing, and wavefront sensing.

Findings

Successful automated acquisition on IR WFSs

Trade-off analysis for deformable mirror sizing

Development of real-time computing architectures

Abstract

NFIRAOS, the Thirty Meter Telescope's first adaptive optics system is an order 60x60 Multi-Conjugate AO system with two deformable mirrors. Although most observing will use 6 laser guide stars, it also has an NGS-only mode. Uniquely, NFIRAOS is cooled to -30 C to reduce thermal background. NFIRAOS delivers a 2-arcminute beam to three client instruments, and relies on up to three IR WFSs in each instrument. We present recent work including: robust automated acquisition on these IR WFSs; trade-off studies for a common-size of deformable mirror; real-time computing architectures; simplified designs for high-order NGS-mode wavefront sensing; modest upgrade concepts for high-contrast imaging.