Development, integration and test of a transportable adaptive optical ground station

In this paper we present the setup including optics and components, the reconstruction scheme and performance measurements of the adaptive optics (AO) system implemented at the 26 cm transportable optical ground station (TAOGS) which is presently located at the Observatorio del Teide, Tenerife. The system is used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of satellite to ground laser communications. It operates with coherent laser communication systems at 1064nm. The wavefront sensor is an 96-element Shack-Hartmann-sensor (11 sub-apertures across the pupil), matched to a 12x12 actuator ”Multi-DM” membrane deformable mirror (DM). The system is able to remove a large part of the turbulence-induced and static wavefront errors by using 90 degrees of freedom (”modes”). Due to a special high speed infrared camera, the control loop can run at speeds up to 10 kHz, depending on the received laser power.