Large stellar interferometer MIRA-ST

Masanori Yoshizawa; Koichi Sato; Jun Nishikawa; Naoko Ohishi; Takayuki Kotani

doi:10.1117/12.458168

21 February 2003 Large stellar interferometer MIRA-ST

Masanori Yoshizawa, Koichi Sato, Jun Nishikawa, Naoko Ohishi, Takayuki Kotani

Proceedings Volume 4838, Interferometry for Optical Astronomy II; (2003) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.458168
Event: Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, 2002, Waikoloa, Hawai'i, United States

Abstract

We propose a millisecond of arc optical/infrared array for stellar territory, MIRA-ST, with nine 4m-aperture off-axis telescopes, whose maximum baseline length is about 600 m. MIRA-ST will have the photon collecting area equivalent to that of a single-dish telescope of 12 m diameter, and the imaging capability better than 1 millisecond of arc resolution at 2.2 micrometers with a high dynamic range of reconstructed images. Combining the light beams from each pupil telescope efficiently is one of the most difficult tasks. We compare the relative merits among a so-called pair-wise beam combining, an all-on-one beam combining, and a tree-structured beam combining. As for transferring the beams from individual telescopes to a beam combining facility with the loss of photons as small as possible, an optical fiber system is a most interesting substitute for the current mirror-and-vacuum-pipe combination. Specifically, the nature of spatial filtering of optical fibers has been under study in the light of deepening the limiting magnitude attainable without introducing an adaptive optics to each telescope. With MIRA-ST we will be able to zoom in the stellar territory to unveil the detailed structures and lifecycles of stars of various kinds, and to examine the universality and/or diversity along the coarse of their evolutionary paths. The specific targets of most interesting for us are, among others, T Tauri stars, AGB and post-AGB stars, Cepheids, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, stellar atmosphere/envelope of low temperature stars, accretion disks, and fundamental structures of main sequence stars.

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Masanori Yoshizawa, Koichi Sato, Jun Nishikawa, Naoko Ohishi, and Takayuki Kotani "Large stellar interferometer MIRA-ST", Proc. SPIE 4838, Interferometry for Optical Astronomy II, (21 February 2003); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.458168

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KEYWORDS

Telescopes

Interferometers

Stars

Adaptive optics

Optical fibers

Mirrors

Spatial resolution

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