RAPID: High-stroke, high-order MEMS deformable mirrors for extremely large telescopes

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New "extremely large telescopes" are being designed by a small number of groups around the world. These ELTs will have primary mirrors of unprecedented sizes (25 to 42 meters!). In order to take advantage of the very high angular resolution and image clarity that these telescopes can deliver, it is necessary to make considerable upgrades to the technology of adaptive optics (AO). AO allows astronomers to correct distortions introduced when the light from distant objects in space passes through the earth's atmosphere. As ttelescopes get larger, the AO must correct over an increasingly large area. Furthermore, since the image resolving capabilities scale with the size of the mirror, the AO techniques must improve along with the mirror size if the best possible images are to be achieved.Current AO technology has come a long way and is now well established and robust. But the challenges for AO with ELTs are considerable. One component of AO systems is a "deformable mirror" (DM) used to rapidly (a thousand times a second) correct the errors introduced by the atmosphere. DMs in use today cannot make the kinds of corrections needed for ELTs. Dr. Joel Kubby of the University of California - Santa Cruz is developing new, larger, and more responsive DMs to meet the coming needs of ELTs. Dr. Kubby's work is supported by NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences through its Advanced Technologies and Instrumentation program.