Combining FLOWFS and pyramid wavefront-sensor measurements

Determine how to optimally combine measurements from the focal plane low-order wavefront sensor and the pyramid wavefront sensor when they operate at different frame rates and have overlapping sensitivity ranges.

Background

The MagAO-X digital twin currently reconstructs low-order aberrations from the focal plane low-order wavefront sensor (FLOWFS), whose small focal-plane mask limits its sensitivity to the first nine Zernike modes. Under atmospheric seeing, the science beam will also contain higher-order aberrations that FLOWFS cannot sense. The authors are therefore developing a digital twin of the pyramid wavefront sensor to provide high-order aberration estimates alongside the FLOWFS-derived low-order estimates.

Because the two wavefront sensors operate at different frame rates and have overlapping sensitivity ranges, a method is needed to fuse their measurements into a consistent wavefront estimate for telemetry-based forward modelling and post-processing.