Everything about Adaptive Optics totally explained
Adaptive optics is a
technology to improve the performance of
optical systems by reducing the effects of rapidly changing optical distortion. It is commonly used on astronomical telescopes to remove the effects of atmospheric distortion, or
astronomical seeing. Adaptive optics works by measuring the distortion and rapidly compensating for it either using deformable
mirrors or material with variable refractive properties. Adaptive Optics was first envisioned by
Horace W. Babcock in 1953. While the technique was theoretically understood for some time, it was only advances in
computer technology during the
1990s that finally made the technique practical. Adaptive optics shouldn't be confused with
active optics, which works on a longer timescale to correct the primary mirror geometry itself. The simplest form of adaptive optics is
tip-tilt correction, which corresponds to correction of the
tilts of the wavefront in two dimensions (equivalent to correction of the position offsets for the image). This is performed using a rapidly moving tip-tilt mirror which makes small rotations around two of its axes. A significant fraction of the aberration introduced by the atmosphere can be removed in this way. Tip-tilt mirrors are widely used in night time and solar
telescopes, to correct the aberration introduced by the
atmosphere on the light path and improve image quality over what would be possible according to the atmospheric
seeing. Tip-tilt mirrors are effectively segmented adaptive optics mirrors having only one segment which can tip and tilt, rather than having an array of multiple segments which can tip and tilt independently.
Introduction
When
light from a
star or another
astronomical object enters the
Earth's atmosphere,
turbulence (introduced, for example, by different temperature layers and different wind speeds interacting) distort and move the image in various ways (see
astronomical seeing for a full discussion). Images produced by any telescope larger than a few
metres are blurred by these distortions. For example, an 8-10 m telescope (like the
VLT or
Keck) can produce AO-corrected images with a
angular resolution of 30-60 milli-
arcsecond (mas)
resolution at infrared wavelengths, while the resolution without correction is of the order of 1
arcsecond.
An adaptive optics system tries to correct these distortions, using a
wavefront sensor which takes some of the astronomical light, a deformable mirror that lies in the optical path, and a computer that receives input from the detector. The wavefront sensor measures the distortions the atmosphere has introduced on the timescale of a few milliseconds; the computer calculates the optimal mirror shape to correct the distortions and the surface of the deformable mirror is reshaped accordingly.
In order to perform adaptive optics correction, the shape of the incoming wavefronts must be measured as a function of position in the telescope aperture plane. Typically the circular telescope aperture is split up into an array of
pixels in a wavefront sensor, either using an array of small
lenslets (a
Shack-Hartmann sensor), or using a curvature or pyramid sensor which operates on images of the telescope aperture. The mean wavefront perturbation in each pixel is calculated. This pixellated map of the wavefronts is fed into the deformable mirror and used to correct the wavefront errors introduced by the atmosphere. It isn't necessary for the shape or size of the astronomical object to be known - even
Solar System objects which are not point-like can be used in a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, and time-varying structure on the surface of the Sun is commonly used for adaptive optics at solar telescopes. The deformable mirror corrects incoming light so that the images appear sharp. Because a science target is often too faint to be used as a reference star for measuring the shape of the optical wavefronts, a nearby brighter
guide star can be used instead. The light from the science target has passed through approximately the same atmospheric turbulence as the reference star's light and so its image is also corrected, although generally to a lower accuracy.
The necessity of a reference star means that an adaptive optics system can't work everywhere on the sky, but only where a
guide star of sufficient
luminosity (for current systems, about
magnitude 12-15) can be found very near to the object of the observation. This severely limits the application of the technique for astronomical observations. Another major limitation is the small field of view over which the adaptive optics correction is good. As the distance from the
guide star increases, the image quality degrades. A technique known as "multiconjugate adaptive optics" uses several deformable mirrors to achieve a greater field of view.
An alternative is the use of a
laser beam to generate a reference light source (a
Laser guide star, LGS) in the atmosphere. LGSs come in two flavors: Rayleigh guide stars and
sodium guide stars. Rayleigh guide stars work by propagating a laser, usually at near ultraviolet wavelengths, and detecting the backscatter from air at altitudes between 15-25 km. Sodium guide stars use laser light at 589
nm to excite sodium atoms in the
mesosphere and
thermosphere, which then appear to "glow". The LGS can then be used as a wavefront reference in the same way as a natural guide star - except that (much fainter) natural reference stars are still required for image position (tip/tilt) information. The lasers are often pulsed, with measurement of the atmosphere being limited to a window occurring a few microseconds after the pulse has been launched. This allows the system to ignore most scattered light at ground level; only light which has travelled for several microseconds high up into the atmosphere and back is actually detected.
Other approaches that can yield resolving power exceeding the limits of atmospheric seeing include
speckle imaging,
aperture synthesis,
lucky imaging and
space telescopes such as
NASA's
Hubble Space Telescope.
Uses of adaptive optics
cone
photoreceptors in the living, human
eye.
Adaptive optics is used for solar astronomy at observatories such as the
Swedish Solar Telescope.
It is also expected to play a military role by allowing ground-based and airborne
laser weapons to reach and destroy targets at a distance including
satellites in
orbit. The
Boeing Airborne Laser programme is the principal example of this.
Adaptive optics has been used to enhance the performance of
free space optical communication systems
(External Link
). Medical applications include imaging of the
retina, where it has been combined with
optical coherence tomography (External Link). Development of an Adaptive Optics Scanning Microscope (ASOM) was announced by
Thorlabs in April 2007. Adaptive and
active optics are also being developed for use in glasses to achieve better than 20/20 vision, initially for military applications
(External Link).
Beam stabilization
A rather simple example is the stabilization of the position and direction of laser beam between modules in a large free space optical communication system.
Fourier optics is used to control both direction and position. The actual beam is measured by
photo diodes. This signal is fed into some
Analog-to-digital converters and a
microcontroller runs a
PID controller algorithm. The controller drives some
digital-to-analog converters which drive
stepper motors attached to
mirror mounts.
If the beam is to be centered onto 4-quadrant diodes, no
Analog-to-digital converter is needed.
Operational amplifiers are sufficient.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Adaptive Optics'.
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