Petalling Mode Sensing for the Thirty Meter Telescope

Petalling modes characterize the differential piston between the petals of the telescope's aperture, typically separated by the secondary mirror support spiders. Since the discovery of petalling modes by the VLT in low wind conditions, addressing these modes has become a focal point, pertinent to nearly all telescopes equipped with high-performance adaptive optics systems. These modes are poorly sensed by mainstream wavefront sensors (WFS). There are three primary factors contributing to petalling modes in general. Firstly, turbulence discontinuity occurs across the spiders due to temperature non-uniformity, particularly in low wind conditions. This issue is partly mitigated by applying low emissivity coating, pioneered by the VLT. Computational fluid dynamics models used to assess the dome seeing aid in quantifying the residual effect. Secondly, phasing and stacking errors may arise in segmented mirrors. For TMT, the impact is negligible owing to the small width of the support spiders (22.5 cm) and highly redundant phasing sensors in the Alignment and Phasing System. Lastly, measurement noise may propagate to these modes, which we have observed when controlling two deformable mirrors in classic adaptive optics (AO) mode with a single pyramid WFS. Employing modal control with truncated modes is a simple and effective mitigation strategy without a notable performance penalty. Nevertheless, having a mechanism that can measure and control the petalling modes will provide reassurance of the AO system's performance. In this paper, we present a novel hybrid iterative petalling sensor (HIPS) that utilizes modal based phase retrieval on time averaged PSFs from diffraction-limited tip/tilt/focus and full aperture low-order wavefront sensors, which breaks the even mode ambiguity. We successfully demonstrated this algorithm in both static and end-to-end closed-loop AO simulations.