Adaptive optics for satellite-to-ground laser communication at the 1m Telescope of the ESA Optical Ground Station, Tenerife, Spain

We present the setup including optics and components, the reconstruction scheme and performance estimations of an Adaptive Optics (AO) system implemented at the 1m telescope of the ESA Optical Ground Station (OGS), Observatorio del Teide, Tenerife. The system will be 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 88-element Shack-Hartmann-sensor (11 subapertures 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 more than 90 degrees of freedom ("modes"). Due to a special high speed infrared camera, the control loop can run at speeds up to 20 kHz, achieving a 0db bandwidth of about 500Hz, depending on the received laser power.