CAMERA - A Compact Affordable MEMS based Rayleigh Adaptive Optics System for 2m class telescopes

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的，地面上的望远镜必须通过地球大气层的干扰来观察深空物体。 当光线穿过大气层时，由于风切变以及大气层内温度和压力的变化，光线会被湍流扩散。这些影响降低了地面望远镜的分辨率。这一困难可以在很大程度上通过采用激光导星（LGS）和自适应光学（AO）的相对较新的技术来克服，其中明亮的激光照亮目标物体附近的一片天空。地球大气层中的小颗粒和分子的瑞利散射确保了激光器发出的部分光返回到望远镜。然后，返回信号可以用于跟踪光的时间依赖性失真。自适应光学利用这些信息快速调整望远镜中的光学元件，以将图像恢复到（几乎）从大气层上方看到的图像。 不幸的是，AO系统非常复杂，昂贵，并且需要相当多的专业知识来维护和操作。由于这些因素，AO目前仅限于大型望远镜。有许多有趣的天文计划将受益于AO所实现的更高分辨率成像能力，但目前只有少数大型望远镜拥有这样的系统。Christoph Baranec博士是加州理工学院的一名年轻博士后学者，他有一个想法，即开发一种专门用于中等尺寸望远镜的低成本AO系统。 他将开发该系统，公开设计计划，并分享系统使用的控制软件。 这一想法有可能使更广泛的天文台和天文学家群体能够通过AO获得高分辨率成像。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Telescopes on the ground must observe objects in deep space through the interference of the earth's atmosphere. As light passes through the atmosphere it gets spread out by turbulence due to wind shear and changes in temperature and pressure within the atmospheric layers. These effects reduce the resolving power of earth-based telescopes. This difficulty can be overcome to a large extent by relatively new techniques employing Laser Guide Stars (LGS) and Adaptive Optics (AO) where a bright laser illuminates a patch of sky near the target object. Rayleigh scattering by small particles and molecules in the earth's atmosphere ensures that some of the light from the laser is returned to the telescope. The return signal can then be used to track the time-dependent distortion of the light. Adaptive Optics uses this information to rapidly adjust optics in the telescope to restore the image to (nearly) what would be seen from above the atmosphere. Unfortunately, AO systems are very complex, expensive, and require considerable expertise to maintain and operate. Because of these factors, AO is currently limited to large telescopes. There are many interesting astronomical programs that would benefit from the higher resolution imaging capabilities enabled by AO, but only a handful of large telescopes currently have such systems. Dr. Christoph Baranec, a young postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, has an idea to develop a low-cost AO system specifically for modest sized telescopes. He will develop the system, make the design plans available publicly, and will also share the control software used by the system. This idea has the potential to make high-resolution imaging through AO available to a much wider community of observatories and astronomers.