Raven , a Multi-Object Adaptive Optics technology and science demonstrator

The University of Victoria Adaptive Optics Laboratory, the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics and Subaru Observatory are building a Multi-Object Adaptive Optics (MOAO) technology and science demonstrator called Raven. Raven will be mounted on the Subaru NIR Nasmyth platform and will feed the IRCS imager and spectrograph. The baseline design calls for three natural guide star (NGS) wavefront sensors (WFS), one on-axis laser guide star (LGS) WFS and two science pickoff arms that will patrol a 3.5 arcminute diameter field of regard (FOR). Sky coverage is an important consideration for a science demonstrator. End-to-end simulations of Raven show that a 10x10 subaperture adaptive optics (AO) system can meet the science requirements, i.e. 30% of the energy ensquared (EE) within a 140mas slit using three R<14 NGSs, and almost 40% EE with the addition of the central LGS. We present here an overview of the Raven project.