NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in collaboration with Blue Line Engineering of Colorado Springs, Colorado, is developing a Segment Alignment Maintenance System (SAMS) for McDonald Observatory's Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). The SAMS shall sense motions of the 91 primary mirror segments and send corrections to HET's primary mirror controller as the mirror segments misalign due to thermo -elastic deformations of the mirror support structure. The SAMS consists of inductive edge sensors. All measurements are sent to the SAMS computer where mirror motion corrections are calculated. In October 2000, a prototype SAMS was installed on a seven-segment cluster of the HET. Subsequent testing has shown that the SAMS concept and architecture are a viable practical approach to maintaining HET's primary mirror figure, or the figure of any large segmented telescope. This paper gives a functional description of the SAMS sub-array components and presents test data to characterize the performance of the subarray SAMS.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Segment Alignment Maintenance System for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    MSFC Technology Days ; 2001 ; Huntsville, AL, United States


    Publication date :

    2001-01-19


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English


    Keywords :



    Hobby-Eberly Telescope mirror comes into focus

    British Library Online Contents | 1997


    Hobby-Eberly Telescope cuts costs to track stars

    Sebring, T. A. | British Library Online Contents | 1997


    Wohnmobil: Hobby 600

    Online Contents | 1995


    Model Hobby

    Online Contents | 1997