Optimization of the Starfire Optical Range 3.5 M adaptive optics for astronomical imaging

Abstract

SAIC has developed a wave-optics, time domain, engineering simulation of adaptive optics systems. The Atmospheric Compensation Simulation (ACS) includes both physics effects (e.g., inner and outer scale, various turbulence profiles, wind, anisoplanatism, time of flight, scattering, absorption, sodium layer saturation) and engineering effects (e.g. jitter, misregistration, latency, digital controls, control surface electro-mechanical response, gain variation, shot and detector noise, quantization, aberrations). The code includes the ability to model multiple three-dimensional laser guidestars, propagating the lasers up from the ground and imaging the irradiance from multiple atmospheric layers onto the detector plane using multiple optical transfer functions or speckle imaging. This simulation has been used to support engineering development on a number of programs and has been validated against theory, experiments, and other codes.