Hardware-Accelerated Wavefront Sensing and Control

The proposal develops a portable digital-signal-processing board that enables a new optical- system architecture for space-telescope systems, while leveraging pre-existing NASA wavefront-sensing (WFS) technology.  

This  approach provides near real-time correction of system misalignments and disturbances, allowing diffraction-limited imaging performance with reduced mass, power, and hardware requirements, compared to conventional architectures using analog sensors or ground-based control loops. Image-based WFS requires a greater number of floating- point operations per unit-time, increasing overall system latency. Our solution to this latency is an on-board, radiation-hard, computing architecture.