Search
Successful internal Factory Acceptance Test for the GNAO Project at Bertin Alpao
GNAO project - Factory acceptance test - adaptive optics
Successful internal Factory Acceptance Test for the GNAO Project at Bertin Alpao

Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting several collaborators from the consortium involved in the Gemini North Adaptive Optics project. This internal milestone marks an important step forward in the development of the next-generation adaptive optics platform that will equip the Gemini North telescope.

GNAO project overview

The GNAO project is the next major adaptive optics upgrade for the Gemini North Telescope on Maunakea, Hawai’i. This new adaptive optics system will replace the existing ALTAIR system with a modern AO platform able to operate in both wide-field and narrow-field modes.

Led by the Astralis consortium (Macquarie University), in collaboration with ONERA and LAM, Bertin Alpao is a key contributor providing a fully integrated and turnkey adaptive optics ecosystem. This includes the development of a new AO bench, a facility system controller and a real-time control system.

As part of this collaboration, Bertin Alpao organized a Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) in order to review the adaptive optics requirements defined in the contract and to conduct a large set of tests to validate the system performance.

For this review, we had the pleasure of welcoming:

  • Dani Guzman, from Australian Astronimical Optics – Macquarie University (Astralis)
  • Benoît Neichel, and Arnaud Striffling, from the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM)
  • Pierre Jouve from Space ODT
  • Thierry Fusco from ONERA

Objectives and demonstrations

During the demonstration, the team worked through a complete serie of tests of the different components of the AO systems including Cameras, Deformable Mirror, TipTilt mirror, and controlles by the HAB (Hardware Abstraction Box), the new interface computer developed by Bertin Alpao.

All demonstrations performed as expected, confirming the system’s maturity.

A turnkey adaptive optics ecosystem provided by Bertin Alpao

A distinctive aspect of Bertin Alpao’s contribution to this project, is its ability to deliver a fully integrated and turnkey Adaptive Optics system : In-house deformable mirror, tip-tilt mirror, wavefront sensing components, cameras (procurement and integration), complete system integration for the AO bench…

This all-in-one approach provides the project with a single point of contact, simplifying system integration for end-users and significantly reduces engineering time.

As highlighted by Dany Guzman (Macquarie University):

“People don’t realize how much time is spent integrating multiple components. A complete AO solution like this is necessary — and Alpao did it marvelously well.”

Next Steps for the project

This successfull FAT represents a key milestone for Bertin Alpao as it highlights our expertise in delivering high-performance adaptive optics componenets and showing our strong in-house engineering capabilities for custom developments. The result of this meeting will be shared and used directly for the upcoming official review scheduled in the coming weeks.

In 2026, the First AO assembly is expected to be installed on an adaptive Optics Bench at the Observatoire de Haute Provence (OHP), followed by the construction of the main AAT in sidney in 2027. Once assembled and validated, the full instrument will be deployed on the Gemini North Telescope in Hawai’i.

Bertin Alpao will continue to support the consortium throughout integration, verification, validation, and deployment phases.