Paper
13 September 2012 The Giant Magellan Telescope phasing system
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Abstract
The 25 m Giant Magellan Telescope consists of seven circular 8.4 m primary mirror segments with matching segmentation of the Gregorian secondary mirror. Achieving the diffraction limit in the adaptive optics observing modes will require equalizing the optical path between pairs of segments to a small fraction of the observing wavelength. This is complicated by the fact that primary mirror segments are separated by up to 40 cm, and composed of borosilicate glass. The phasing system therefore includes both edge sensors to sense high-frequency disturbances, and wavefront sensors to measure their long-term drift and sense atmosphere-induced segment piston errors. The major subsystems include a laser metrology system monitoring the primary mirror segments, capacitive edge sensors between secondary mirror segments, a phasing camera with a wide capture range, and an additional sensitive optical piston sensor incorporated into each AO instrument. We describe in this paper the overall phasing strategy, controls scheme, and the expected performance of the system with respect to the overall adaptive optics error budget. Further details may be found in specific papers on each of the subsystems.
© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Antonin H. Bouchez, Brian A. McLeod, D. Scott Acton, Srikrishna Kanneganti, Edward J. Kibblewhite, Stephen A. Shectman, and Marcos A. van Dam "The Giant Magellan Telescope phasing system", Proc. SPIE 8447, Adaptive Optics Systems III, 84473S (13 September 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.927163
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Cited by 13 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Sensors

Metrology

Control systems

Telescopes

Adaptive optics

Mirrors

Cameras

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