نبذة مختصرة : International audience ; In 2024/2025, the GRAVITY+ Adaptive Optics (GPAO) project installed four extreme AO systems on the 8-meter UTs of the Very Large Telescope: 43x43 deformable mirrors (DM, 1432 actuators), 40x40 (1240 sub-apertures (SA)) visible and 30x30 (704 SA) laser guide star Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors (SH-WFS) with 9x9 (60 SA) infrared or 2x2 (12 SA) visible SH-WFSs for low order sensing. These subsystems are distributed across the entire infrastructure (pupil in M2 rotating with elevation ; DM in Coudé train wobbling and rotating with azimuth ; WFSs fixed on the ground ; science focal plane in the interferometric laboratory 150 meters away). GPAO’s complexity prefigures that of the AO systems of future giant telescopes: numerous modes, many moving components, and the need to operate robustly in a broad range of magnitudes and turbulence conditions. GPAO successfully achieved these goals thanks to a complete re-design of the tools available in the Standard Platform for Adaptive optics Real Time Applications (SPARTA, from ESO) and the development of new, versatile methods based on physical modelling and inverse problem approaches. In this work we present the five main modules and their on-sky performances: (i) the Pseudo-Synthetic Interaction Matrix (PSIM) module, in charge to numerically (and quickly) compensate the system rotation, which includes a physical model of the ALPAO DM influence functions, (ii) the innovative estimators of WFS/DM lateral mis-registrations for the instrument bootstrapping through the turbulence in open loop and its auto-alignment in closed loop, (iii) a robust spot monitor for faint star detection and centering during the automatic acquisition sequence and for the update of the weighted center of gravity in closed loop, (iv) the atmospheric and performance monitor made versatile to the different GPAO modes and augmented with an innovative multi-layer profiler for wind estimation, and (v) a pupil monitor that offers a fine positioning of the photometric pupil, its ...
No Comments.