Detailed Design of a Deployable Tertiary Mirror for the Keck I Telescope

Motivated by the ever increasing pursuit of science with the transient sky (dubbed Time Domain Astronomy or TDA), we are fabricating and will commission a new deployable tertiary mirror for the Keck I telescope (K1DM3) at the W.M. Keck Observatory. This paper presents the detailed design of K1DM3 wi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2016-09
Main Authors: Prochaska, J Xavier, Ratliff, Chris, Cabak, Jerry, Tripsas, Alex, Adkins, Sean, Bolte, Michael, Cowley, David, Dahler, Mike, Deich, Will, Hilton, Lewis, Nelson, Jerry, Park, Sam, Peck, Michael, Phillips, Drew, Pollard, Mike, Randolph, Bill, Sanford, Dale, Ward, Jim, Wold, Truman
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomy
Communications systems
Compressed air
Opto-mechanics
Time domain analysis
Vignetting
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Motivated by the ever increasing pursuit of science with the transient sky (dubbed Time Domain Astronomy or TDA), we are fabricating and will commission a new deployable tertiary mirror for the Keck I telescope (K1DM3) at the W.M. Keck Observatory. This paper presents the detailed design of K1DM3 with emphasis on the opto-mechanics. This project has presented several design challenges. Foremost are the competing requirements to avoid vignetting the light path when retracted against a sufficiently rigid system for high-precision and repeatable pointing. The design utilizes an actuated swing arm to retract the mirror or deploy it into a kinematic coupling. The K1DM3 project has also required the design and development of custom connections to provide power, communications, and compressed air to the system. This NSF-MRI funded project is planned to be commissioned in Spring 2017.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1609.02060