Optical design challenges of NFIRAOS, the first-light adaptive optics system for TMT
Bibliographic record
Abstract
NFIRAOS (Narrow Field InfraRed Adaptive Optics System, pronounced nefarious) is the first light adaptive optics system for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). It is a near-IR, diffraction limited, multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) system that uses two deformable mirrors to correct aberrations due to atmospheric turbulence. The f/15 beam delivered by the telescope, with a two arc-minute field of view, is relayed to one of three client instrument ports. Wavefront sensing is accomplished with six high order sodium laser guide star (LGS) wavefront sensors (WFSs) and three visible natural guide star (NGS) wavefront sensors. Plus, the control system uses two tip/tilt and one focus infrared WFSs located in the instruments. In this paper, we describe several optical design challenges we have faced. The science optics have been redesigned to meet evolving specifications, and the LGS WFS design has undergone multiple iterations. We present an overview of the optical systems and design drivers, including the current state of each design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".