Development a simple MEMS-based astronomical adaptive optics system at laboratory

We are developing Adaptive Optics (AO) system for astronomical use. The He-Ne laser works as an artificial light source. The tip-tilt correction servo is added to our AO system. The tip-tilt term, among the Zernike terms, is the biggest contributor of wavefront deformation caused by atmospheric turbulence at small telescopes. The tip-tilt correction servo consists of a Piezo tip-tilt platform with a mirror, a quadrant photodiode as a tip-tilt sensor, and controllers. The Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor measures the residual wavefront errors and they are corrected by the MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical System) deformable mirror. The MEMS deformable mirror allows the compact size at low cost compare to adaptive secondary mirror and other deformable mirrors. As the frame rates of the MEMS deformable mirror is about tens of kHz, the frame rates of the detector in wavefront sensor is the bottleneck of the wavefront correction speed. For faster performance, we replaced a CCD which provides frame rates only 70 Hz with a CMOS with frame rates up to 450 Hz.