This talk presents a report on the design of the RTC for MORFEO, the MCAO module for the ESO Extremely Large Telescope. MORFEO provides extensive sky coverage, wide field of view and diffraction-limited correction in the near infrared. Its wavefront sensing is based on six Laser Guide Stars (LGS) and up to three Natural Guide Stars (NGS) for tomographic atmospheric turbulence reconstruction, while three deformable mirrors (ELT M4 and two post-focal DMs) provide wavefront correction on a field up to 2’.

The core control strategy of MORFEO is the Pseudo Open Loop Control (POLC) implemented by means of three control loops: the High Order (HO) loop running at 500 Hz, the Low Order (LO) loop running at 0.1-1 Hz, and the Reference (REF) loop operating at 0.1-100 Hz. The HO and LO loops handle split tomography and real-time DMs control, while the REF loop corrects slow evolving aberrations due both to the system and to the atmosphere. The three control loops are implemented in the hard real time core of the RTC, the HRTC, based on a hardware design focused on low latency and low jitter.

The soft RTC (SRTC), based on the RTC-Toolkit provided by ESO, performs supervisory, optimization, measurements and calibration tasks. INAF supervises the overall development of the RTC and in particular of the SRTC. NRC-HAA, having recently joined the MORFEO Consortium, is in charge of the final design and deployment of the HRTC.

Italo Foppiani,  INAF-OAS National Institute for Astrophysics