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The Ingot project is aimed at the feasibility study of an innovative and indispensable wavefront sensor (Ingot-WFS), proposed by the Adaptive Optics group in Padova, to be used in combination of laser guide stars. It is based on the idea of optimizing the match between the elongated source, which can be considered like “a cigar in the sky”, and the optical surface used to sense it, shaped like an ingot prism. Its advancement can be considered as a risk mitigator for the AO systems of the future giant telescopes (ELTs), whose baselines foresee the use of “classical” sensors with such elongated sources: using the I-WFS it will be possible to achieve better performance in terms of the correction of astronomical images.
The study is developed by a passionate group of young researchers and accounts for numerical simulations, lab experiments, the prototype and, finally the verification on sky at the CANARY facility of the William Herschel Telescope in La Palma.
Optical bench@INAF-OAPD laboratory to test alignment procedures.
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