Performance Prediction of a Laser-guide Star Adaptive Optics System for a 1.6 m Telescope

We are currently investigating the feasibility of a 1.6 m telescope with a laser-guide star adaptive optics (AO) system. The telescope, if successfully commissioned, would be the first dedicated adaptive optics observatory in South Korea. The 1.6 m telescope is an f/13.6 Cassegrain telescope with a focal length of 21.7 m. This paper first reviews atmospheric seeing conditions measured over a year in 2014~2015 at the Bohyun Observatory, South Korea, which corresponds to an area from 11.6 to 21.6 cm within 95% probability with regard to the Fried parameter of 880 nm at a telescope pupil plane. We then derive principal seeing conditions such as the Fried parameter and Greenwood frequency for eight astronomical spectral bands (V/R/I/J/H/K/L/M centered at 0.55, 0.64, 0.79, 1.22, 1.65, 2.20, 3.55, and $4.77{\mu}m$). Then we propose an AO system with a laser guide star for the 1.6 m telescope based on the seeing conditions. The proposed AO system consists of a fast tip/tilt secondary mirror, a $17{\times}17$ deformable mirror, a $16{\times}16$ Shack-Hartmann sensor, and a sodium laser guide star (589.2 nm). The high order AO system is close-looped with 2 KHz sampling frequency while the tip/tilt mirror is independently close-looped with 63 Hz sampling frequency. The AO system has three operational concepts: 1) bright target observation with its own wavefront sensing, 2) less bright star observation with wavefront sensing from another bright natural guide star (NGS), and 3) faint target observation with tip/tilt sensing from a bright natural guide star and wavefront sensing from a laser guide star. We name these three concepts 'None', 'NGS only', and 'LGS + NGS', respectively. Following a thorough investigation into the error sources of the AO system, we predict the root mean square (RMS) wavefront error of the system and its corresponding Strehl ratio over nine analysis cases over the worst ($2{\sigma}$) seeing conditions. From the analysis, we expect Strehl ratio >0.3 in most seeing conditions with guide stars.