MAVIS passed the Preliminary Design Review in March 2023 and kick started its phase C early June. We are aiming at a Final Design Review in December 2024. I will report on the state of MAVIS design, as well as general project updates, schedule, procurement, risks. We are working on early procurement (Long Lead Item review held on October 2023) as well as on a number of prototype activities I will report on.
The MCAO-Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph (MAVIS) will utilise the Adaptive Optics Facility of the ESO Very Large Telescope, UT4. In order to fully harness the resolving power of an 8 m telescope in the visible spectrum, the AO system of MAVIS must adhere to a tight wavefront error budget. The demanding performance requirements flow into all aspects of the MAVIS design, not the least of which is the wavefront estimation strategy, leveraging tomographic turbulence measurements from 3 natural guide stars and 8 laser guide stars, all coupled to Shack Hartmann wavefront sensors. In this paper, we summarise the wavefront estimation processes proposed for MAVIS. In a companion paper, we discuss the LGS WFS design.
MCAO Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph (MAVIS) is a new instrument for ESO’s VLT AOF. MAVIS embarks an Adaptive Optics (AO) system to cancel the image blurring induced by atmospheric turbulence. The latency and computational load induced by the system dimensioning led us to design a new software and hardware architecture for the Real Time Controller (RTC). Notably, the COSMIC framework harnesses GPUs for accelerated computation and is adept at scaling across multiple processes without overhead using shared memory. Employing a graph-based architecture where operations are intuitively represented as nodes. It aims at simplifying design, implementation, testing and integration by relying on robust concepts and useful tools. Recent updates have further enhanced its versatility, cementing its potential as a future-proof, extensible framework for AO advancements and their development process.
MAVIS is the new MCAO Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph for ESO’s Very Large Telescope. It is intended to be installed at the Nasmyth focus of UT4 “Yepun” telescope and it is composed of two main parts: a multi conjugate adaptive optics module and its post focal instrumentation, an imager and an IFU spectrograph, both operating in the visible spectrum. The project is now in the final design phase, and it is expected to be commissioned in 2030. In this paper we focus on the interface between the Instrument Control System Software (ICSS) and the Soft Real-Time Computer (SRTC). ICSS is in charge of controlling all the motorized functions, managing the scientific exposures, monitoring the status of the system and coordinating the sequence of operations; on the other hand, RTC receives data from from the wavefront sensors (8 LGS and 3 NGS) to compute the corrections to be applied by the two-post focal deformable mirrors and 8 LGS jitter mirrors. ICSS will be based on the new ESO ELT software framework, which is still under development; SRTC will be based on the new ESO RTC Toolkit, also under development. We present the first design of the common interface between ICSS and SRTC, focusing mainly on the communication processes (commands and data) and which are the most critical points we had to face.
The MCAO Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph (MAVIS) is a new instrument being built for the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). It will operate at the Nasmyth focus of “UT4” telescope and it is composed of two main parts: a Multi - Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) module and two post focal scientific channels, an imager and an integral field spectrograph, both operating in the visible spectrum. The project is approaching the final steps of the preliminary design phase and it is expected to have the first light in 2027. We present the status of the Instrument Control Software (ICSS). In particular, we focus on the software architecture and the interaction between ICSS and real-time computer (RTC), telescope control system (TCS) and VLT Laser Guide Stars Facility (4LGSF). Besides the complexity of the instrument, we present a software architecture that is simple and still maintains modularity, guaranteeing the overall functionality of the instrument.
MAVIS (the MCAO Assisted Visible Imager & Spectrograph) will be driven by a high performance real-time control (RTC) system relying on cutting edge hardware and software technologies, including the hard real-time pipeline as well as the supervisory and tightly coupled telemetry sub-systems. To meet the extremely challenging requirements of a complex instrument like MAVIS, this forward looking implementation of the COSMIC platform is designed to support, end-to-end, a wide range of control schemes, from classical model-based approaches up to modern data-driven methodologies. In this paper, we will review the design and prototyping activities being led during phase B of the project.
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