ELT design status: the most powerful ground telescope

Marchiori, Gianpietro; Rampini, Francesco; Ghedin, Leonardo; Bressan, Riccardo

doi:10.1117/12.2314947

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The future of astronomical AO is apparent in plans for the coming generation of the 25 to 39 m so-called Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs). These are the 25 m Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) 206 , the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) 207 , and the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) 208 . Compared to existing 5-10 m AO equipped observatories, these telescopes will offer ground-breaking improvements in diffraction-limited resolution and sensitivity.…”

Section: [H1] Outlookmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive optics for high-resolution imaging

2021

Nat Rev Methods Primers

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Adaptive optics (AO), a technique that corrects for optical aberrations, was originally proposed to correct for the blurring effect of atmospheric turbulence on images in ground-based telescopes; indeed, the technique was instrumental in the work that resulted in the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy, which was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. When AO is used to correct for the eye's imperfect optics, retinal changes at the cellular level can be detected, allowing us to study the operation of the visual system and to assess ocular health in the microscopic domain. By correcting for sample-induced blur in microscopy, it has pushed the boundaries of imaging in thick tissue specimens, such as when observing neuronal processes in the brain. The focus of this primer is the application of AO for high resolution imaging in astronomy, vision science, and microscopy. It begins with an overview of the general principles of AO and its main components, which include methods to measure the aberrations and devices for their correction. These components are linked in operation via a control system. Results and applications from each field are presented, along with reproducibility considerations and limitations. Finally, future directions are discussed. [H1] IntroductionHigh resolution optical imaging relies upon the high fidelity focussing of light. Light can be described in terms of optical fields[G], and thus its properties are parametrized for a given wavelength at each point in space and time in terms of amplitude, phase and polarization. However, these fields can be perturbed (in amplitude, phase and polarization) as they propagate through optical systems and other media, and the performance of the imaging systems can be highly sensitive to those perturbations. For instance, astronomical image quality is limited by atmospheric turbulence; microscopes produce blurred images when samples have a non-uniform refractive index distribution; and ophthalmoscopes that image the back of the eye are detrimentally affected by the eye's imperfect optics. Adaptive optics (AO) is an ensemble of electro-optical and computational methods that aim at recovering the optimal performance of an optical system 1-6 . This has brought benefits to a range of applications. For example, by integrating AO in their telescopes, astronomers have been able to expand the observation of celestial bodies 7 . Implemented into microscopes, AO has enabled neuroscientists to monitor the activity of neurons embedded deep inside the living mammalian brain 8,9 . And integrated into ophthalmoscopes, vision scientists and ophthalmologists are able to visualize, quantify, and track in situ the many different types of cells that compose the retina, offering significant clinical potential 10-14 .There are many imaging applications in which AO has a significant impact, and the above list is far from exhaustive.Compensation [G] through modulation of the optical field is the fundamental working principle through which AO allevia...

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Section: [H1] Outlookmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive optics for high-resolution imaging

2021

Nat Rev Methods Primers

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“…Our knowledge of the Universe will make a giant leap as the largest ground-based telescopes, with diameters of 25 to 40m [13,43], see first light before the end of this decade. They will provide the angular resolution and collecting area required to detect the first stars and first galaxies as well as faint rocky exoplanets around other stars, possibly harboring life.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Meeting the real-time challenges of ground-based telescopes using low-rank matrix computations

Ltaief

Cranney

Gratadour

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

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Adaptive Optics (AO) is a technology that permits to measure and mitigate the distortion effects of atmospheric turbulence on optical beams. AO must operate in real-time by controlling thousands of actuators to shape the surface of deformable mirrors deployed on ground-based telescopes to compensate for these distortions. The command vectors that trigger how each individual actuator should act to bend a portion of the mirror are obtained from Matrix-Vector Multiplications (MVM). We identify and leverage the data sparsity structure of these control matrices coming from the MAVIS instruments for the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. We provide performance evaluation on x86 and acceleratorbased systems. We present the impact of tile low-rank (TLR) matrix approximations on time-to-solution for the MVM and assess the produced image quality. We achieve performance improvement up to two orders of magnitude for TLR-MVM compared to regular dense MVM, while maintaining the image quality.

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