Sensing and control of segmented mirrors with a pyramid wavefront sensor in the presence of spiders

TL;DR

This paper investigates methods to improve wavefront sensing and control of segmented telescopes with spiders, focusing on overcoming the poor sensitivity of the Pyramid Wavefront Sensor to differential piston errors caused by segmentation and atmospheric turbulence.

Contribution

It compares three approaches for reducing differential piston errors in segmented mirrors using a Pyramid WFS, identifying pair-wise slaving as the most effective method.

Findings

Pair-wise slaving increases wavefront error by only 20-45 nm RMS under typical seeing conditions.

Reducing modulation in the Pyramid WFS improves sensitivity but is insufficient alone.

Combining multiple methods could enhance robustness in wavefront control.

Abstract

The segmentation of the telescope pupil (by spiders & the segmented M4) create areas of phase isolated by the width of the spiders on the wavefront sensor (WFS), breaking the spatial continuity of the wavefront. The poor sensitivity of the Pyramid WFS (PWFS) to differential piston leads to badly seen and therefore uncontrollable differential pistons. In close loop operation, differential pistons between segments will settle around integer values of the average sensing wavelength. The differential pistons typically range from one to ten times the sensing wavelength and vary rapidly over time, leading to extremely poor performance. In addition, aberrations created by atmospheric turbulence will contain large amounts of differential piston between the segments. Removing piston contribution over each of the DM segments leads to poor performance. In an attempt to reduce the impact of unwanted differential pistons that are injected by the AO correction, we compare three different approaches. We first limit ourselves to only use the information measured by the PWFS, in particular by reducing the modulation. We show that using this information sensibly is important but will not be sufficient. We discuss possible ways of improvement by using prior information. A second approach is based on phase closure of the DM commands and assumes the continuity of the correction wavefront over the entire unsegmented pupil. The last approach is based on the pair-wise slaving of edge actuators and shows the best results. We compare the performance of these methods using realistic end-to-end simulations. We find that pair-wise slaving leads to a small increase of the total wavefront error, only adding between 20-45 nm RMS in quadrature for seeing conditions between 0.45-0.85 arcsec. Finally, we discuss the possibility of combining the different proposed solutions to increase robustness.