Slashdot Mirror
A Ground-Based Scope That Flexes For Better Focus
Steve0987 writes "EE Times Online has an interesting article on a deformable telescope mirror that the University of Arizona has built. It uses 336 magnetic coils to deform the 2 foot secondary mirror and change its shape to compensate for everything from wind blowing against the telescope to atmospheric aberations. It is purported to provide 3 times the resolution of the Hubble telescope. (And you don't have to go into space to fix it."
Plus, time on big scopes is limited and there's a huge demand. Even the Palomar 200 inch scope, with optics that aren't as good as what we'd make today, keeps a full schedule of research. And that thing has to be 70 years old or something close to that. Big research scopes never become obsolete in the sense that nobody wants to use them.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Wow!
As a person who's spent about 15 years working with closed-loop controls in computer systems, my mind boggles at the thought of the quantity and variety of feedback devices required to pull this off.
Accelerometers and strain transducers for wind forces, ground vibration and thermal effects on structures at the very least (and multitudes of them, all calibrated with respect to their location, etc). What I'm really having trouble with is how they are managing the thermal and atmospheric compensations.
OTOH, this is an acedemic project and the statement "we have the *potential* to get images that are three times sharper than the Hubble" (my emphesis added) from the article doesn't inspire great confidence in what they may *really* have.
Anyway, I'm off to look for answers at this link to the Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics at the University of Arizona, the folks doing this work.