On-sky reconstruction of Keck Primary Mirror Piston Offsets using a Zernike Wavefront Sensor

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the first on-sky use of a Zernike wavefront sensor to measure piston offsets in the Keck telescope's segmented mirror, showing promising agreement with phase retrieval methods despite some limitations.

Contribution

It provides the first on-sky validation of Zernike wavefront sensor for segment piston measurement on a large telescope, bridging laboratory results to real observations.

Findings

Good agreement between ZWFS and phase retrieval measurements.

Measured piston offsets of approximately 400 nm with ~50 nm accuracy.

Limitations due to adaptive optics residuals affecting measurement range.

Abstract

The next generation of large ground- and space-based optical telescopes will have segmented primary mirrors. Co-phasing the segments requires a sensitive wavefront sensor capable of measuring phase discontinuities. The Zernike wavefront sensor (ZWFS) is a passive wavefront sensor that has been demonstrated to sense segmented-mirror piston, tip, and tilt with picometer precision in laboratory settings. We present the first on-sky results of an adaptive optics fed ZWFS on a segmented aperture telescope, W.M. Keck Observatory's Keck II. Within the Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) light path, the ZWFS mask operates in the H-band using an InGaAs detector (CRED2). We piston segments of the primary mirror by a known amount and measure the mirror's shape using both the ZWFS and a phase retrieval method on data acquired with the facility infrared imager, NIRC2. In the latter case, we employ slightly defocused NIRC2 images and a modified Gerchberg-Saxton phase retrieval algorithm to estimate the applied wavefront error. We find good agreement when comparing the phase retrieval and ZWFS reconstructions, with average measurements of 408 +/- 23 nm and 394 +/- 46 nm, respectively, for three segments pistoned by 400 nm of optical path difference (OPD). Applying various OPDs, we are limited to 100 nm OPD of applied piston due to our observations' insufficient averaging of adaptive optics residuals. We also present simulations of the ZWFS that help explain the systematic offset observed in the ZWFS reconstructed data.