Investigation of Thirty Meter Telescope wavefront maintenance using low-order Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors to correct for thermally-induced misalignments

We evaluate how well the performance of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) can be maintained against thermally induced errors during a night of observation. We first demonstrate that using look-up-table style correction for TMT thermal errors is unlikely to meet the required optical performance specifications. Therefore, we primarily investigate the use of a Shack-Hartmann Wavefront Sensor (SH WFS) to sense and correct the low spatial frequency errors induced by the dynamic thermal environment. Given a basic SH WFS design, we position single or multiple sensors within the telescope field of view and assess telescope performance using the JPL optical ray tracing tool MACOS for wavefront simulation. Performance for each error source, wavefront sensing configuration, and control scheme is evaluated using wavefront error, plate scale, pupil motion, pointing error, and the Point Source Sensitivity (PSSN) as metrics. This study provides insight into optimizing the active optics control methodology for TMT in conjunction with the Alignment and Phasing System (APS) and primary mirror control system (M1CS).