ULTIMATE-Subaru: GLAO preliminary design overview

Abstract

ULTIMATE-Subaru∗ is a next facility instrumentation program of the Subaru Telescope. The goal of this project is to extend the wide-field capability of the Subaru telescope to near-infrared (NIR) wavelength, by developing a wide-field ground-layer adaptive optics (GLAO) system and wide-field NIR instruments. The GLAO system will uniformly improve the image quality up to 20-arcmin field of view in diameter by correcting for the ground-layer turbulence. The expected image quality after the GLAO correction is FWHM ∼ 0′′.2 in K-band under moderate seeing conditions. In this presentation, we present preliminary design overview of the GLAO system at the Cassegrain focus, which consist of an adaptive secondary mirror, wavefront sensor unit, a laser guide star facility, and control system. We also present the prototyping activities to validate the selected design of the GLAO system. Show more