The Path To Visible Extreme Adaptive Optics With MagAO-2K and MagAO-X

Males, Jared R.; Close, Laird M.; Guyon, Olivier; Morzinski, Katie M.; Hinz, Philip; Esposito, Simone; Pinna, Enrico; Xompero, Marco; Briguglio, Runa; Riccardi, Armando; Puglisi, Alfio; Mazin, Ben; Ireland, Michael J.; Weinberger, Alycia; Conrad, Al; Kenworthy, Matthew; Snik, Frans; Otten, Gilles; Jovanovic, Nemanja; Lozi, Julien; Marchetti, E; Close, LM; Veran, JP
2016
ADAPTIVE OPTICS SYSTEMS V
DOI
10.1117/12.2234105
The next generation of extremely large telescopes (ELTs) have the potential to image habitable rocky planets, if suitably optimized. This will require the development of fast high order "extreme" adaptive optics systems for the ELTs. Located near the excellent site of the future GMT, the Magellan AO system (MagAO) is an ideal on-sky testbed for high contrast imaging development. Here we discuss planned upgrades to MagAO. These include improvements in WFS sampling (enabling correction of more modes) and an increase in speed to 2000 Hz, as well as an H2RG detector upgrade for the Clio infrared camera. This NSF funded project, MagAO-2K, is planned to be on-sky in November 2016 and will significantly improve the performance of MagAO at short wavelengths. Finally, we describe MagAO-X, a visible-wavelength extreme-AO "afterburner" system under development. MagAO-X will deliver Strehl ratios of over 80% in the optical and is optimized for visible light coronagraphy.