Software design for a balloon-borne solar telescope

Dan Zhu; Jianing Wang

doi:10.1117/12.460284

11 February 2003 Software design for a balloon-borne solar telescope

Dan Zhu, Jianing Wang

Proceedings Volume 4853, Innovative Telescopes and Instrumentation for Solar Astrophysics; (2003) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.460284
Event: Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, 2002, Waikoloa, Hawai'i, United States

Abstract

This paper introduces our control software design for a tracing system of precise pointing on a balloon-borne telescope to observe the active details on the solar surface. The telescope is an equatorial one with 80 cm in diameter. Borne by balloon, it works at 30 km above the sea level so as to get rid of the image disturbance due to atmosphere. The system contains three parts: basket control, telescope control and tip-tilt control. For telescope control, the crude sensors for pointing detection are two rotating transformers, while the fine sensors two linear CCDs which produce the error signals of pointing. An inserted-type industry-control computer PC104 completes the position close-loop and then drives the servo amplifiers to carry out pointing, searching and tracing automatically. Due to the fact that the position control loop is closed with an improved digital PID arithmetic, the adjustment of the telescope may respond rapidly, therefore the telescope can precisely follow the Sun on the balloon. Simulation test shows that the tracing accuracy may reach as high as 4" (RMS).

Citation Download Citation

Dan Zhu and Jianing Wang "Software design for a balloon-borne solar telescope", Proc. SPIE 4853, Innovative Telescopes and Instrumentation for Solar Astrophysics, (11 February 2003); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.460284

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