Mirror Design For Optical Telescopes
ثبت نشده
چکیده
The reflectormirror is the most important component of an astronomical optical telescope. This chapter provides discussions on the requirements for astronomical optical mirrors; the ways to reduce mirror weight, mirror cost, and mirror materials; the methods of mirror figuring, polishing, and surface coating; the design of mirror support mechanism; the concept of mirror seeing; and the stray light control. Emphasis is placed on various mirror designs for modern large optical telescopes. These include the thin mirror, honeycomb mirror, segmented mirror, andmulti-mirror telescope concepts.When discussing all these concepts, important formulas and their restrictions are provided for the reader’s reference so that they may use them in their mirror design practice. The discussion on the mirror support system is thorough and comprehensive, including both the positional and flotation support systems. A new mirror support system using a hexapod platform is also introduced. In the stray light control section, a new scattering theory based on the bidirectional reflectance distribution function is also introduced.
منابع مشابه
Using Nodal Aberration Theory to understand the aberrations of multiple unobscured Three Mirror Anastigmatic (TMA) telescopes
The alignment of three mirror anastigmatic (TMA) telescopes has been studied since their invention in the 60s. Recently, Thompson et al. reported that other than the conventional uniform coma over the field caused by misalignment, TMA telescopes display only one other misalignment induced aberration, field-asymmetric, field-linear astigmatism. Currently, an instrument with three TMAs is under d...
متن کاملMeasurement accuracy in control of segmented-mirror telescopes.
Design concepts for future large optical telescopes have highly segmented primary mirrors, with the out-of-plane degrees of freedom actively controlled. We estimate the contribution to errors in controlling the primary mirror that results from sensor noise and, in particular, compare mechanical measurements of relative segment motion with optical wave-front information. Data from the Keck teles...
متن کاملTwo-mirror telescope design with third-order coma insensitive to decenter misalignment.
Misalignments always occur in real optical systems. These misalignments do not generate new aberration forms, but they change the aberration field dependence. Two-mirror telescopes have been used in several applications. We analyze a two-mirror telescope configuration that has negligible sensitivity to decenter misalignments. By applying the wave aberration theory for plane-symmetric optical sy...
متن کاملDesign study of 8 meter monolithic mirror UV/optical space telescope
The planned Ares V launch vehicle with its 10 meter fairing shroud and 55,000 kg capacity to the Sun Earth L2 point enables entirely new classes of space telescopes. NASA MSFC has conducted a preliminary study that demonstrates the feasibility of launching a 6 to 8 meter class monolithic primary mirror telescope to Sun-Earth L2 using an Ares V. Specific technical areas studied included optical ...
متن کاملAtmospheric dispersion compensation for extremely large telescopes.
Achieving diffraction limited imaging with future ground-based optical telescopes will require adaptive optics for correction of atmospheric turbulence and also efficient techniques for atmospheric dispersion compensation. We study the benefit of using a linear atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) coupled with a deformable mirror on a 42-m Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) operating in the VIRJ...
متن کامل