Abstract

The Phillips Laboratory has been developing laser guide star adaptive optics since 1982 under a military research program that has only recently permitted public release of data. In 1983 we demonstrated the feasibility of the laser guide star concept in an experiment at the Starfire Optical Range (SOR). The experiment quantitatively confirmed D. L. Fried’s theory that the wavefront error incurred by using the laser guide star instead of a real guide star increases with the 5/3 power of the aperture diameter. In early 1989 we successfully operated a closed loop, continuous correction adaptive optics system on the SOR 1.5-m telescope using a copper vapor laser to generate artificial beacons by Rayleigh backscatter at 10-km range.

© 1991 Optical Society of America