The Simonyi Survey Telescope (formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) of the Rubin Observatory is an 8.4m telescope now in construction on Cerro Pachón, in Chile. This telescope has been designed to conduct a 10 years’ survey of the sky in which it will map the entire night sky every three nights. The Mirror Cell Assembly system is a 9x9m steel structure that provides positioning, support, figure correction and temperature control to the primary and tertiary mirror. It is composed of two main systems, the Support System and the Thermal Control System. The Support System provides positioning, support and figure control of the mirror as well as dynamic forces compensation. The Thermal Control System will control the bulk temperature and temperature variations throughout the mirror. The temperature variations produce thermal distortions of the mirror which produce image degrading distortion of the optical surface. Variations between the bulk temperature and the ambient degrade local seeing and can produce condensation. The mirror cell assembly was designed and build in Tucson, Arizona by the LSST engineering team, and was tested, to confirm correct integration, at the Richard F Caris Mirror Lab to confirm the optical performance of the system using the real glass mirror. After successful testing, the mirror cell assembly was disassembled, packed and shipped to the Cerro Pachón summit in Chile where it was integrated with the surrogate mirror, and installed on the telescope mount assembly (TMA) for system performance test. Once system performance test concluded, the mirror cell was transported to the maintenance level to remove the metal surrogate mirror, install the glass and coat. After coating the mirror, the mirror cell assembly will be integrated with the telescope mount assembly to conduct final testing and verification.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is an integrated survey system, currently under construction in Chile, to accomplish a 10-year optical survey of the southern sky. The 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope mount is nearing completion and undergoing final verification and performance testing. Since the system is optimized for etendue, the telescope mount slewing performance is particularly critical to overall survey efficiency. For example, this high performance mount is required to slew 3.5 degrees, on the sky, and settle in a 4-second period. Here an account of the mount subsystem is presented and selected dynamic performance results from on-site testing are described.
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