News Releases

March 2009

Astronomy - Homer, a unique way of validating the adaptive optics of the future

 

Onera has just finished the development of the Homer test bench, designed for the implementation and testing of new concepts of wide field adaptive optics and proposed for the Extremely Large Telescope of the ESO. The first results confirm the unique potential of systems equipped with this technology.

The “high angular resolution” team of the Theoretical and Applied Optics Department at Onera have finished the development and validation of its new Homer adaptive optics test bench (Hartmann Oriented Multiconjugate Experimental Resource). This test bench has already been used to compare a concept of wide field adaptive optics (several measurement directions and one or two correction mirrors) with a conventional approach (a single measurement direction and a single mirror). This was the first experimental implementation of tomography adaptive optics with reconstitution and optimal correction of the volume of turbulence.

Onera, internationally recognized expert in adaptive optics, adopted this very young, and very complex technique principally thanks to the research initiative of the DGA (Délégation general pour l’armement, the French government’s armaments procurement agency). The Homer test bench was designed in a very modular fashion to facilitate experimentation with different types of systems and controls in order to evaluate their performance in the correction of the effects of turbulence on the widest possible field.

The value of this work becomes very clear in the feasibility studies for the future giant 42 m diameter telescope (E-ELT – European Extremely Large Telescope) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). It’s a big challenge: observing, particularly but not exclusively, objects that are more and more remote, to be able to go back in time, to understand the processes of the formation and evolution of the galaxies and, ultimately, of the whole of our Universe.

On the left an image in conventional AO. On the right, what would be obtained with a system using wide field adaptive optics: the resolution is better across the whole zone (and not only at one point)

 

Contact: Cyril Petit , ingénieur-chercheur à l'Onera

Last Update: March 16, 2009 - © ONERA 2009 - Terms of use