Advanced Rayleigh Guided Ground Layer Adaptive Optics System (ARGOS) is a multi-star adaptive optics system which is built for use with the
Large Binocular Telescope (LBT).
With ARGOS, both sides of the LBT will be equipped with a multi-laser beacon system and corresponding wavefront sensors.
The artificial beacons are created by
Rayleigh scattering the earth´s
atmosphere
An atmosphere () is a layer of gas or layers of gases that envelop a planet, and is held in place by the gravity of the planetary body. A planet retains an atmosphere when the gravity is great and the temperature of the atmosphere is low. A s ...
using high power pulsed green
lasers. The purpose of ARGOS is to generate six artificial laser guide stars to correct the ground layer turbulence above the LBT mirrors. This will decrease the distortions induced by the atmospheric turbulence, and therefore the imaging and spectroscopic capability of
LUCIFER, the LBT spectrograph.
References
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Astronomical instruments