Over the past several years, experiments in adaptive optics involving multiple natural and laser guide stars have been carried out at the 1.55 m Kuiper telescope and the 6.5 m MMT telescope. The astronomical imaging improvement anticipated from both ground-layer and tomographic adaptive optics has been calculated. Ground-layer adaptive optics will reduce the effects of atmospheric seeing, increasing the resolution and sensitivity of astronomical observations over wide fields. Tomographic adaptive optics will provide diffraction-limited imaging along a single line of sight, increasing the amount of sky coverage available to adaptive optics correction.A new facility class wavefront sensor has been deployed at the MMT which will support closed-loop adaptive optics correction using a constellation of five Rayleigh laser guide stars and the deformable F/15 secondary mirror. The adaptive optics control loop was closed for the first time around the focus signal from all five laser signals in July of 2007, demonstrating that the system is working properly. It is anticipated that the full high-order ground-layer adaptive optics loop, controlled by the laser signals in conjunction with a tip/tilt natural guide star, will be closed in September 2007, with the imaging performance delivered by the system optimized and evaluated.The work here is intended to be both its own productive scientific endeavor for the MMT, but also as a proof of concept for the advanced adaptive optics systems designed to support observing at the Large Binocular Telescope and future extremely large telescopes such as the Giant Magellan Telescope.

Detection of earth-size exoplanets using the astrometric signal of the host star requires sub-microarcsecond measurement precision. One major challenge in achieving this precision using a medium-size (< 2-m) space telescope is the calibration of dynamic distortions. A diffractive pupil can be used to generate polychromatic diffraction spikes in the focal plane, which encode the distortions in the optical system and may be used to calibrate astrometric measurements. The first half of this dissertation discusses the design and construction of a laboratory to test this concept. The main components of the system are a high stability star simulator, a diffraction limited off-axis optical system, and the data reduction algorithms to obtain the distortion map calibration. Currently, the laboratory is operational and first tests of distortion measurements have been done validating this concept to improve the astrometric accuracy of a telescope. The second part of this dissertation describes the use of the multi-laser guide star (LGS) system available at the 6.5 m MMT telescope to characterize GLAO performance and advance Laser Tomography Adaptive Optics (LTAO) technology. The system uses five range-gated and dynamically refocused Rayleigh laser beacons to sense the atmospheric wavefront aberration. Corrections are then applied to the wavefront using the 336-actuator adaptive secondary mirror of the telescope. So far, the system has demonstrated successful control of ground-layer aberration over a field of view (FoV) substantially wider than is delivered by conventional adaptive optics, yielding reduction in the width of the on-axis point-spread function from 1.07" to < 0.2" in H band. Both techniques can be combined to improve the astrometric accuracy of ground based telescopes, especially when using Multi-Conjugated Adaptive Optics (MCAO). A diffractive pupil can be used to calibrate the distortions induced by multiple Deformable Mirrors (DM), which is the main limitation to use this kind of AO system for high precision astrometric measurements.

La simulation fine de systèmes d'OA à grand champ de type MOAO ou LTAO pour l'ELT se heurte à deux problématiques: l'augmentation du nombre de degrés de liberté du système. Cette augmentation rend les codes de simulation classiques peu utilisables, en particulier en ce qui concerne les processus d'inversion et de calcul matriciel. La complexité des systèmes, combinant EGL et EGN, grands miroirs déformables couvrant tout le champs et des miroirs dédiés dans les instruments eux mêmes, des rotations différentielles de pupille et ou de champs. Cette complexité conduit aux développements de procédures nouvelles d'étalonnage, de filtrage et fusion de données, de commande distribuée ou globale. Ces procédures doivent être simulées finement, comparées et quantifiées en termes de performances, avant d'être implantées dans de futurs systèmes. Pour répondre à ces deux besoins, le LAM développe en collaboration avec l'ONERA un code de simulation complet, basé sur une approche de résolution itérative de systèmes linéaires à grand nombre de paramètres (matrices creuses). Sur cette base, il incorpore de nouveaux concepts de filtrage et de fusion de données pour gérer efficacement les modes de tip/tilt/defocus dans le processus complet de reconstruction tomographique. Il permettra aussi, de développer et tester des lois de commandes complexes ayant à gérer un la combinaison du télescope adaptatif et d'instrument post-focaux comportant eux aussi des miroirs déformables dédiés.La première application de cet outil se fait naturellement dans le cadre du projet EAGLE, un des instruments phares du futur E-ELT, qui, du point de vue de l'OA combinera l'ensemble de ces problématiques. / Refined simulation tools for wide field AO systems on ELTs present new challenges. Increasing the number of degrees of freedom makes the standard simulation's codes useless due to the huge number of operations to be performed at each step of the AO loop process. The classical matrix inversion and the VMM have to be replaced by a cleverer iterative resolution of the Least Square or Minimum Mean Square Error criterion. For this new generation of AO systems, concepts themselves will become more complex: data fusion coming from multiple LGS and NGS will have to be optimized, mirrors covering all the field of view associated to dedicated mirrors inside the scientific instrument itself will have to be coupled using split or integrated tomography schemes, differential pupil or/and field rotations will have to be considered.All these new entries should be carefully simulated, analysed and quantified in terms of performance before any implementation in AO systems. For those reasons i developed, in collaboration with the ONERA, a full simulation code, based on iterative solution of linear systems with many parameters (sparse matrices). On this basis, I introduced new concepts of filtering and data fusion to effectively manage modes such as tip, tilt and defoc in the entire process of tomographic reconstruction. The code will also eventually help to develop and test complex control laws who have to manage a combination of adaptive telescope and post-focal instrument including dedicated DM.

We present an overview of the current and future adaptive optics systems at the LBTO along with the current and planned science instruments they feed. All the AO systems make use of the two 672 actuator adaptive secondary mirrors. They are (1) FLAO (NGS/SCAO) feeding the LUCI NIR imagers/spectrographs; (2) LBTI/AO (NGS/SCAO) feeding the NIR/MIR imagers and LBTI beam combiner; (3) the ARGOS LGS GLAO system feeding LUCIs; and (4) LINO-NIRVANA - an NGS/MCAO imager and interferometer system. AO performance of the current systems is presented along with proposed performances for the newer systems taking into account the future instrumentation.