2min chapter

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#355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds

Lex Fridman Podcast

CHAPTER

Adaptive Optics Can Correct for Wave Front Errors

Adaptive optics can correct for what's called wave front errors that happen through the Earth's atmosphere. This means two light rays which are traveling at slightly different spatial separations from each other will arrive at the detector at different times. And so you have an incoherent light source. The way they correct for this is to bend the mirror on this on the straight one down a little bit to make it an equivalent light path distance. It's actually made up of like thousands of elements almost looks like a liquid mirror because they can manipulate it in real time.

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