Characterisation of ALPAO deformable mirrors for the NAOMI VLTI Auxiliary Telescopes Adaptive Optics

TL;DR

This paper characterizes ALPAO deformable mirrors for the NAOMI adaptive optics system on VLTI Auxiliary Telescopes, demonstrating their suitability for high-precision, open-loop, chopping, and piston-free control in interferometry.

Contribution

It provides an extensive characterization of ALPAO DMs, showing they meet the stringent requirements for the first astronomical system with true Zernike mode commands and deformable mirror chopping.

Findings

ALPAO DMs meet most operational requirements.

Deviations from specifications are manageable.

NAOMI will be the first system with true Zernike mode commands and chopping with DMs.

Abstract

The Very Large Telescope Interferometer Auxiliary Telescopes will soon be equipped with an adaptive optics system called NAOMI. The corrective optics deformable mirror is the commercial DM241 from ALPAO. Being part of an interferometer operating from visible to mid-infrared, the DMs of NAOMI face several challenges (high level of reliability, open-loop chopping, piston-free control, WFS/DM pupil rotation, high desired bandwidth and stroke). We here describe our extensive characterization of the DMs through measurements and simulations. We summarize the operational scenario we have defined to handle the specific mirror properties. We conclude that the ALPAO DMs have overall excellent properties that fulfill most of the stringent requirements and that deviations from specifications are easily handled. To our knowledge, NAOMI will be the first astronomical system with a command in true Zernike modes (allowing software rotation), and the first astronomical system in which a chopping is performed with the deformable mirror (5'' sky, at 5~Hz).