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K. A. Page (University of Wyoming)
Telescopes employing adaptive optics (AO) systems are no longer limited by atmospheric turbulence, but are instead limited by the performance of the AO system. One such limitation of the current generation AO systems is an inherent temporal lag between the detection and correction of incident wave fronts.
It has been shown that for time intervals of interest in AO, the atmosphere can be modeled as a collection of static screens moving across the telescope aperture with the prevailing winds (the Taylor frozen flow hypothesis). This allows us to use a zonal wave front sensor (WFS) to measure the velocities of the layers of turbulence present over the site. Once the layer velocities have been measured, it is possible to use this information in conjunction with contemporary WFS measurements to predict atmospheric turbulence a few milliseconds in advance, thus overcoming the system lag. We present a linear predictor model with results from applying this method to simulated wave fronts.
This work has been funded in part by the U.S. Army Research Office grant DAAG55-98-1-0242.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: kpage@uwyo.edu