NUMBER OF CORRECTING MIRRORS VERSUS THE NUMBER OF MEASURED POINTS IN ADAPTIVE OPTICS

A Hartman-sensor-based, adaptive optics system is analyzed using numer ical simulation. The same simulation was used to quantify the lucky sh ot concept. One-dimensional, isoplanatic wavefronts were generated, co ntaining the known spatial and statistical properties of atmospheric-t urbulence-degraded wavefronts. The quality of the corrected wavefronts was analyzed as a function of different combinations of sensor (lensl et) number and correcting mirror number. It is shown that it is possib le to reduce the number of correcting mirrors with no great loss of im age quality. As a consequence of the wavefront simulation, it is shown that the lucky shot occurrence probability is very low.