Performance of an iterative wavelet reconstructor for the Multi-conjugate Adaptive Optics RelaY of ESO's ELT

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the iterative FEWHA algorithm for wavefront reconstruction in the MAORY adaptive optics system of ESO's ELT, emphasizing its speed, accuracy, and adaptability in real-time atmospheric correction.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes the matrix-free FEWHA iterative algorithm for efficient, real-time wavefront reconstruction in large-scale adaptive optics systems.

Findings

FEWHA achieves fast reconstruction suitable for real-time AO correction.

The method maintains high accuracy despite ill-posed atmospheric tomography.

FEWHA enables on-the-fly system updates with minimal computational overhead.

Abstract

The Multi-conjugate Adaptive Optics RelaY (MAORY) is one of the key Adaptive Optics (AO) systems on the European Southern Observatory's Extremely Large Telescope. MAORY aims to achieve a good wavefront correction over a large field of view, which involves a tomographic estimation of the 3D atmospheric wavefront disturbance. Mathematically, the reconstruction of turbulent layers in the atmosphere is severely ill-posed, hence, limits the achievable reconstruction accuracy. Moreover, the reconstruction has to be performed in real-time at a few hundred to one thousand Hertz frame rates. Huge amounts of data have to be processed and thousands of actuators of the deformable mirrors have to be controlled by elaborated algorithms. Even with extensive parallelization and pipelining, direct solvers, such as the Matrix Vector Multiplication (MVM) method, are extremely demanding. Thus, research in the last years shifted into the direction of iterative methods. In this paper we focus on the iterative Finite Element Wavelet Hybrid Algorithm (FEWHA). The key feature of FEWHA is a matrix-free representation of all operators involved, which makes the algorithm fast and enables on the fly system updates whenever parameters at the telescope or in the atmosphere change. We provide a performance analysis of the method regarding quality and run-time for the MAORY instrument using the AO software package COMPASS.