The Laser Guide Stars Wavefront Sensor prototype for the E-ELT: test results

The current baseline for the Multi-Conjugate adaptive optics module (MAORY) for the European Extremely Large Telescope is based on the Sodium Laser Guide Stars (LGS) approach, in order to ensure correction uniformity and sky coverage. However, since the Sodium layer is approximately 10 km thick, the artificial reference source looks elongated, especially when observed from the edge of a large aperture, with elongation depending on the actual telescope diameter, on the Sodium layer properties and on the laser launcher position. We studied numerically, by means of simulations, the performance of three different algorithms for the instantaneous LGS image position measurement in presence of elongated spots: the Weighted Center of Gravity, the Correlation and the Quad-cell. Since all the three considered algorithms require some sort of 'reference', the problem of the temporal variation of the Sodium Layer properties has to be addressed. Another important aspect that has be addressed in the analysis is the impact of the low-order aberrations introduced by the MAORY re-imaging optics, by the Sodium Density profile shape and by its projection in the LGS image plane. An LGS wavefront sensor laboratory prototype was designed to reproduce the relevant aspects of a Shack-Hartmann wavefront Sensor for the European Extremely Large Telescope and, through laboratory tests, to evaluate the performance of different centroid algorithms in presence of elongated spots, with realistic Sodium profiles, as previously investigated numerically and analytically, analyzing the impact of the low-order aberrations and of relevant WFS parameters, like signal-to-noise ratio, sampling and subaperture size. This paper shows the results of the tests performed with this prototype.