Large adaptive deformable membrane mirror with high actuator density

With the future growing size of telescopes, new, high-resolution, affordable wavefront corrector technology with low power dissipation is needed. A new adaptive deformable mirror concept is presented, to meet such requirements. The adaptive mirror consists of a thin (30-50 µm), highly reflective, deformable membrane. An actuator grid with thousands of actuators is designed which push and pull at the membrane"s surface, free from pinning and piston effects. The membrane and the actuator grid are supported by an optimized light and stiff honeycomb sandwich structure. This mechanically stable and thermally insensitive support structure provides a stiff reference plane for the actuators. The design is extendable up to several hundreds of mm's. Low-voltage electro-magnetic actuators have been designed. These highly linear actuators can provide a stroke of 15 micrometers. The design allows for a stroke difference between adjacent actuators larger than 1 micron. The actuator grid has a layer-based design; these layers extend over a large numbers of actuators. The current actuator design allows for actuator pitches of 3 mm or more. Actuation is free from play, friction and mechanical hysteresis and therefore has a high positioning resolution and is highly repeatable. The lowest mechanical resonance frequency is in the range of kHz so a high control bandwidth can be achieved. The power dissipation in the actuator grid is in the order of milliwatts per actuator. Because of this low power dissipation active cooling is not required. A first prototype is currently being developed. Prototypes will be developed with increasing number of actuators.