Wavefront Sensor for Adaptive Optics Mitigation of Aero-Optics Effects

Airborne directed energy and imaging systems must contended with the aberrating effects of atmospheric turbulence and turbulent flows immediately around the aircraft. For high-energy laser weapon systems, flow-induced disturbances in the index of refraction of air result in fast, erratic changes to propagation direction and spatial distribution of laser energy that hinder the efficacy of the system. Adaptive optics is a mature technology for sensing and correcting optical aberrations. However, due to trade-offs in the temporal and spatial resolution of phase corrections, state-of-the-art adaptive optics systems are only able to compensate for the low-order spatial modes of phase perturbations associated with the rapidly evolving flow near the aircraft.  Nanohmics proposes to develop a compact, low-latency, analog wavefront sensor for the adaptive optics mitigation of aero-optical disturbances of airborne optical systems. The sensor will be based on the modern implementation and coupling of two classical wavefront sensing techniques: Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing using position sensing detectors and analog wavefront reconstruction. The sensor will capture slope measurements and return reconstructed wavefront values on a 16x16 subaperture grid at bandwidths greater than 200kHz. The sensor will be compatible with tactical airborne environments and will have a small size and weight footprint.