Demonstration of a segment alignment maintenance system on a seven-segment subarray of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope

John M. Rakoczy; Drew Hall; Richard T. Howard; John T. Weir; Edward E. Montgomery IV; Gregory H. Ames; Tim Danielson; Phil Zercher

doi:10.1117/12.454780

4 February 2002 Demonstration of a segment alignment maintenance system on a seven-segment subarray of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope

John M. Rakoczy, Drew Hall, Richard T. Howard, John T. Weir, Edward E. Montgomery IV, Gregory H. Ames, Tim Danielson, Phil Zercher

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 4494, Adaptive Optics Systems and Technology II; (2002) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.454780
Event: International Symposium on Optical Science and Technology, 2001, San Diego, CA, United States

Abstract

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in collaboration with Blue Line Engineering of Colorado Springs, Colorado, is developing a Segment Alignment Maintenance System (SAMS) for McDonald Observatory's Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). The SAMS shall sense motions of the 91 primary mirror segments and send corrections to HET's primary mirror controller as the mirror segments misalign due to thermo-elastic deformations of the mirror support structure. The SAMS consists of inductive edge sensors. All measurements are sent to the SAMS computer where mirror motion corrections are calculated. In October 2000, a prototype SAMS was installed on a seven-segment cluster of the HET. Subsequent testing has shown that the SAMS concept and architecture are a viable practical approach to maintaining HET's primary mirror figure, or the figure of any large segmented telescope. This paper gives a functional description of the SAMS sub-array components and presents test data to characterize the performance of the sub-array SAMS.

Citation Download Citation

John M. Rakoczy, Drew Hall, Richard T. Howard, John T. Weir, Edward E. Montgomery IV, Gregory H. Ames, Tim Danielson, and Phil Zercher "Demonstration of a segment alignment maintenance system on a seven-segment subarray of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope", Proc. SPIE 4494, Adaptive Optics Systems and Technology II, (4 February 2002); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.454780

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