An application of adaptive techniques to vibration rejection in adaptive optics systems

• We describe the problem of vibrations in telescopes using adaptive optics (AO).
• We set requirements that an algorithm for vibration rejection in AO have to fulfill.
• We propose an adaptive algorithm for vibration rejection in AO systems.
• We validate the algorithm on both a simple and a fully detailed simulator.
• We validate the algorithm using measurements coming from natural/laser guide stars.

In modern Adaptive Optics (AO) systems, lightly damped sinusoidal oscillations resulting from telescope structural vibrations have a significant deleterious impact on the quality of the image collected at the detector plane. These oscillations can be observed in any mode of a generic modal representation of the AO wave-front sensor. A technique for the rejection of periodic disturbances recently presented in the literature has been adapted to the problem of rejecting vibrations in AO loops. The proposed methodology aims at estimating the harmonic disturbance together with the response of the plant at the vibration frequency. The algorithm has been tested in simulation on realistic scenarios and at the telescope.