The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has been conducting research in novel portable adaptive optics systems for many years. These systems are tested exhaustively in a laboratory environment before being migrated to field experiments on astronomical telescopes. As part of the laboratory testing, an atmosphere simulator hardware testbed has been developed to provide a realization of atmospheric turbulence based on Kolmogorov statistics. In this testbed, a high-pixel count liquid crystal spatial light modulator induces the atmospheric turbulence through a series of computer calculated phase maps. User controls allow a wide range of telescope apertures and seeing conditions to be explored for testing the adaptive optics system. This paper explains and reports on the use of this dynamic and expandable system in characterizing the performance and optimization parameters of the adaptive optics systems at NRL.
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