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International audience; HARMONI is the first light, adaptive optics assisted, integral field spectrograph for the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). A work-horse instrument, it provides the ELT’s diffraction limited spectroscopic capability across the near-infrared wavelength range. HARMONI will exploit the ELT’s unique combination of exquisite spatial resolution and enormous collecting area, enabling transformational science. The design of the instrument is being finalized, and the plans for assembly, integration and testing are being detailed. We present an overview of the instrument’s capabilities from a user perspective, and provide a summary of the instrument’s design. We also include recent changes to the project, both technical and programmatic, that have resulted from red-flag actions. Finally, we outline some of the simulated HARMONI observations currently being analyzed.

International audience

It is well known that Adaptive Optics (AO) observations do require the availability of natural stars (beside laser guide stars - LGSs) to obtain the tip-tilt and focus information of the atmospheric turbulence. Bright natural stars are not always available imposing the ultimate limit to the AO technology due to the small technical field planned for 40m range telescopes. The use of multiple LGSs, with their respective wavefront sensors and tomographic computations, requires the proper reconstruction of the turbulence column adding significant complexity and cost to the Adaptive Optics systems. Precise knowledge of the tip-tilt information is extremely useful for the accurate pointing of lasers in groundto-space optical communications and in space situational awareness applications. In these contexts the tip-tilt information cannot be obtained from natural stars. Our group have proposed an alternative way of measuring all relevant values of the atmospheric turbulence, specifically including tip-tilt, focus and also higher order aberrations, and tomographic information based on the use of the foreseen density anisotropies in the sodium layer. Results of an analysis using the available information about sodium layer profiles will be presented, showing up to what point anisotropies with the proper spatial and time scales could be expected. The requirements of a laser launch system capable of illuminating uniformly the metapupil at the height of the Na layer are identified and special attention is paid to the required laser power. The extended object generated at the Na-Layer should then be analysed with a wavefront sensor suited to that characteristic. The plenoptic camera is the potential candidate under study in this paper.

The Gran Telescopio Canarias Adaptive Optics (GTCAO) will measure the wavefront with a Shack-Hartmann sensor. This wavefront sensor (WFS) is based on the CCD220, an electron-multiplying CCD (EMCCD) that achieves sub-electron readout noise, increasing the signal to noise ratio when weak natural guide stars (NGS) are used as reference. GTCAO will start its operation in telescope with NGS, using only one wavefront sensor, and later it will incorporate a Laser Guide Star (LGS) and consequently a second WFS, also based on an EMCCD. Both EMCCDs and a third one used as spare, have been characterized and compared including the system gain, electron- multiplication gain, readout noise vs gain, excess noise and linearity. The EM gain calibration is important to keep all EMCCD channels in the linear regime and the camera manufacturer carries it out, but it is reported that the multiplication gain may suffer ageing and degradation even if the camera is not in use. This suggests the need to monitor this ageing. In this paper it is proposed and tested a procedure for predictive maintenance that re-characterize the system gain, electron- multiplication gain and linearity periodically in order to predict the eventual ageing of the EMCCD multiplying registers. This procedure can be carried out quickly while the detector is installed in the WFS and in operational status. In order to provide the required illumination, the GTCAO calibration system is used.

The Sun is an ideal object for the development of Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) since solar structure provides multiple “guide stars” in any desired configuration. Current MCAO systems imply a number of wavefront sensors, each of them sensing an area of the Sun. The plenoptic camera is a novel concept for wavefront sensing, capable of measuring the tomography of the atmospheric turbulence. By using it, the possibility of a MCAO system with a single sensor becomes a reality. This paper describes the functionality of the plenoptic camera as a tomographic wavefront sensor after implementing it into the OOMAO simulator. Simulation results demonstrate the potential of this sensor to reconstruct atmospheric turbulence in different layers by using a synthetic solar image as a reference.

The Uplink Wavefront Corrector System (UWCS) has been conceived by following the premises from simulation outcomes as a pathfinder instrument to demonstrate Adaptive Optics uplink correction in both applications: Free-Space Optical Communications and self-propagating path of Laser Guide Stars. Preliminary design and expected performance have been analysed via simulations in previous studies. Current activities focus on the turbulence measurement on the launch axis itself by using pulsed or modulated lasers and a pulse-synchronized Shack-Hartmann as wavefront sensor. Present paper describes the test bench it has been built in the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) to experimentally demonstrate the uplink correction and its advantages.

The Optical Ground Station (OGS), installed in the Teide Observatory since 1995, was built as part of ESA efforts in the research field of satellite optical communications to test laser telecommunication terminals on board of satellites in Low Earth Orbit and Geostationary Orbit. As far as one side of the link is settled on the Earth, the laser beam (either on the uplink or on the downlink) has to bear with the atmospheric turbulence. Within the framework of designing an Adaptive Optics system to improve the performance of the Free-Space Optical Communications at the OGS, turbulence conditions regarding uplink and downlink have been simulated within the OOMAO (Object-Oriented Matlab Adaptive Optics) Toolbox as well as the possible utilization of a Laser Guide Star to measure the wavefront in this context. Simulations have been carried out by reducing available atmospheric profiles regarding both night-time and day-time measurements and by having into account possible seasonal changes. An AO proposal to reduce atmospheric aberrations and, therefore, ameliorate FSO links performance is presented and analysed in this paper

HARMONI is an integral field spectrograph working at visible and near-infrared wavelengths over a range of spatial scales from ground layer corrected to fully diffraction-limited. The instrument has been chosen to be part of the first-light complement at the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). This paper describes the instrument control electronics to be developed at IAC. The large size of the HARMONI instrument, its cryogenic operation, and the fact that it must operate with enhanced reliability is a challenge from the point of view of the control electronics design. The present paper describes a design proposal based on the current instrument requirements and intended to be fully compliant with the ESO E-ELT standards, as well as with the European EMC and safety standards. The modularity of the design and the use of COTS standard hardware will benefit the project in several aspects, as reduced costs, shorter schedule by the use of commercially available components, and improved quality by the use of well proven solutions.

During the last 20 years, many DIMM instruments have been developed to measure astronomical seeing. The IAC has been involved in several projects to run different campaigns to characterize its observatories. However, the cost in manpower to maintain and operate these instruments has been too high and it is mandatory to minimize this effort by constructing a reliable, robust and available seeing monitor. A review of all sources of errors has been done in order to fit very reliable measurements: acquisition parameters, box size, signal threshold, SNR threshold, flux, deformations and vibrations for centroid calculations, best pixel scale, jitter in the images sampling, light bandwidth, CCD noise, as well as the centroid calculation algorithm. Experimental measurements about the influence of exposure time, number of images for computing the seeing or defocus have been carried out to identify the practical limits of the instrument. The IAC automatic DIMM design has been reviewed to improve its robustness and its availability to guarantee the minimum down-time and to maximize the time between failures. The new design will be shown as part of this work.

The use of AO in Extremely Large Telescopes, used to improve performances in smaller telescopes, becomes now mandatory to achieve diffraction limited images according to the large apertures. On the other hand, the new dimensions push the specifications of the AO systems to new frontiers where the order of magnitude in terms of computation power, time response and the required numbers of actuators impose new challenges to the technology. In some aspects implementation methods used in the past result no longer applicable. This paper examines the real dimension of the problem imposed by ELTs and shows the results obtained in the laboratory for a real modal wavefront recovery algorithm (Hudgin) implemented in FPGAs. Some approximations are studied and the performances in terms of configuration parameters are compared. Also a preferred configuration will be justified.