Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes 4 – Conference Proceedings

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is a gregorian 25.5-meter diameter primary mirror (M1) made of 7 8.4-meter diameter circular aspheric segments. The secondary mirror (M2) is a 1/8th down-scale model of M1 madeof 7 1- meter diameter segments. Each segments has positionners to adjust its 6 rigid body motions. The gureof M1 segment is controlled with 44 bending modes and M2 segments are deformed using 672 actuators. Inthe active and adaptive operation modes of the GMT, around a dozen wavefront sensors (WFS) are selectivelyused to monitor the optical aberrations building-up into the telescope. A dedicated control system feeds backthe WFS measurements to the mirrors actuators to deliver image quality optimized for the eld of view of eachscientic instrument. This paper describes the GMT Dynamic Optical Simulation (DOS) tool. DOS integratesthe optical and mechanical model of the telescope together with the control system. DOS is a cloud-basedoptical propagation software package with build-in models for both geometric and Fourier optics and a fullcontrol algorithm development environment.