Real-time massively distributed multi-object adaptive optics simulations for the european extremely large telescope

Abstract

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) is one of today's most challenging projects in ground-based astronomy. Addressing one of the key science cases for the E-ELT, the study of the early Universe, requires the implementation of multi-object adaptive optics (MOAO), a dedicated concept relying on turbulence tomography. We use a novel pseudo-Analytical approach to simulate the performance of tomographic reconstruction of the atmospheric turbulence in an MOAO system on real datasets. We simulate simultaneously 4K galaxies in a common field of view on massively parallel supercomputers during a single night of observations. We are able to generate a first-ever high-resolution galaxy map at almost a real-Time throughput. This simulation scale opens new research horizons in numerical methods for experimental astronomy, some core components of the pipeline standing as pathfinders toward actual operations and future astronomic discoveries on the E-ELT.