HeNOS is a test bench designed to be a scaled down version of NFIRAOS, the rst lightMCAO instrument for the Thirty Meter Telescope. The system was designed and built in theadaptive optics lab at NRC Herzberg in Victoria. The goal of the test bench is to assess theprediction quality of MAOS, the simulation software for NFIRAOS, to test the robustness ofthe tomographic algorithm under slowly changing conditions and to evaluate the calibrationmethods considered for the real instrument. For these tasks it is important to know the realdimensions of HeNOS with good precision. The goal of the tests presented here is to obtain thesystem parameters from the bench and compare them to the design.

Multi-conjugate adaptive optics is a central technology for the Extremely Large Telescopes (NFIRAOS on TMTand MAORY on E-ELT). GeMS on the 8-m Gemini South telescope is the rst facility-class MCAO and therst to use laser guide stars. We have observed the Galactic globular cluster NGC 1851 (and 5 other targets)and here we present the results of the prole-tting photometry in the near-infrared. This is the most precisephotometry to date of a cluster taken from the ground, conrmed by our ability to detect the double subgiantbranch, previously observed only from space. The high Strehl ratio of the images pushes the depth of the stellardetections well below the main sequence knee of the colour-magnitude diagram, making this also the deepestnear-infrared CMD yet obtained from ground. The large number of stars allows to evaluate the performanceof the instrument in terms of position-dependent PSF. We demonstrate how the analysis of the spatial andtemporal PSF variations allows us to develop eective photometric techniques for MCAO to be used for the nextgeneration of large telescopes.

NFIRAOS, the first light AO system for the Thirty Meter Telescope, will include a natural guide star (NGS) pyramidwave-front sensor (PWFS). This WFS will have two functions: (i) when there is a bright enough NGS within the sciencefield and the lasers are turned off, the PWFS will act as the fast high order WFS driving the SCAO loop (e.g. for highcontrastimaging); and (ii) when the lasers are in use and the system operates in MCAO mode, the PWFS will act as aslow truth WFS (e.g. to measure drifts in the structure of the sodium layer). The decision to select a PWFS instead of amore conventional Shack-Hartmann WFS (SHWFS) is the outcome of a detailed trade study. In this paper, wesummarize the results of this trade study. These include extensive simulation work, which shows that, in the expectedoperating conditions of NFIRAOS, the PWFS will bring significant performance improvements, including higher Strehlratio, higher limiting magnitude and lower residual speckle levels for high contrast imaging, even when the system hasto correct for significant levels of non-common path aberrations. Our simulation results also provides new insights onthe properties of the PWFSs. We also report on opto-mechanical design work, which shows that, with the PWFS, the twofunctions (i) and (ii) can actually be combined into a single optical path, thus reducing the complexity in terms ofnumber of mechanisms and optical elements. Finally, we discuss the impacts of switching to a PWFS on the otheralready designed NFIRAOS sub-systems (e.g. the real-time computer), which we have found to be very modest.

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) first light instrument IRIS (Infrared Imaging Spectrograph) will complete its preliminary design phase in 2016. The IRIS instrument design includes a near-infrared (0.85-2.4 micron) integral field spectrograph (IFS) and imager that are able to conduct simultaneous diffraction-limited observations behind the advanced adaptive optics system NFIRAOS. The IRIS science cases have continued to be developed and new science studies have been investigated to aid in technical performance and design requirements. In this development phase, the IRIS science team has paid particular attention to the selection of filters, gratings, sensitivities of the entire system, and science cases that will benefit from the parallel mode of the IFS and imaging camera. We present new science cases for IRIS using the latest end-To-end data simulator on the following topics: Solar System bodies, the Galactic center, active galactic nuclei (AGN), and distant gravitationally-lensed galaxies. We then briefly discuss the necessity of an advanced data management system and data reduction pipeline.