Dr. Avinash Surendran

The development of the Keck All sky Precision Adaptive optics (KAPA) project was initiated in September 2018 to upgrade the Keck I Adaptive Optics (AO) system to enable laser tomography with a four laser guide star (LGS) asterism. The project includes the upgrade of the existing laser to a 22W Toptica laser, the implementation of a new real-time controller (RTC) and wavefront sensor optics and camera (OCAM2K by First Light Imaging), and a new daytime calibration and test platform to provide the required infrastructure for laser tomography. The work presented here describes the new daytime calibration infrastructure and pseudo open-loop tomographic algorithms developed for KAPA. This includes the hardware infrastructure for daytime calibration and performance assessment of tomographic algorithms, which consists of an asterism simulator having fiber-coupled light sources simulating four Laser Guide Stars (LGS) and two Natural Guide Stars (NGS) at the AO bench focus, as well as the upgrade of the existing telescope simulator on the AO bench to simulate focal anisoplanatism and wind driven atmospheric turbulence. A phase screen, that can be adjusted in effective altitude, is used to simulate wind speeds up to 10 m/s for a duration of 3 s. The characterization of the OCAM2K camera will also be briefly discussed.