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。地面望远镜必须通过地球大气层的干扰来观测深空物体。当光穿过大气层时，由于风的切变以及大气层内温度和压力的变化，它被湍流传播开来。这些效应降低了地面望远镜的分辨率。这一困难在很大程度上可以通过使用激光导星(LGS)和自适应光学(AO)的相对较新的技术来克服，在这种技术中，明亮的激光照射目标对象附近的一片天空。地球大气中的小颗粒和小分子的瑞利散射确保了来自激光的一些光返回到望远镜。然后可以使用返回信号来跟踪光的随时间变化的失真。自适应光学利用这些信息来快速调整望远镜中的光学元件，将图像恢复到(几乎)从大气层上方所能看到的水平。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，目前AO仅限于大型望远镜。有许多有趣的天文项目将受益于AO带来的更高分辨率的成像能力，但目前只有少数大型望远镜有这样的系统。加州理工学院年轻的博士后学者克里斯托夫·巴内奇博士有一个想法，那就是专门为中等尺寸的望远镜开发一种低成本的AO系统。他将开发该系统，将设计方案公之于众，还将分享该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.