Paper
9 August 2016 Final integration and alignment of LINC-NIRVANA
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The LBT (Large Binocular Telescope), located at about 3200m on Mount Graham (Tucson, Arizona) is an innovative project undertaken by institutions from Europe and USA. LINC-NIRVANA is an instrument which provides MCAO (Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics) and interferometry, combining the light from the two 8.4m telescopes coherently. This configuration offers 23m-baseline optical resolution and the sensitivity of a 12m mirror, with a 2 arc-minute diffraction limited field of view. The integration, alignment and testing of such a big instrument requires a well-organized choreography and AIV planning which has been developed in a hierarchical way. The instrument is divided in largely independent systems, and all of them consist of various subsystems. Every subsystem integration ends with a verification test and an acceptance procedure. When a certain number of systems are finished and accepted, the instrument AIV phase starts. This hierarchical approach allows testing at early stages with simple setups. The philosophy is to have internally aligned subsystems to be integrated in the instrument optical path, and extrapolate to finally align the instrument to the Gregorian bent foci of the telescope. The alignment plan was successfully executed in Heidelberg at MPIA facilities, and now the instrument is being re-integrated at the LBT over a series of 11 campaigns along the year 2016. After its commissioning, the instrument will offer MCAO sensing with the LBT telescope. The interferometric mode will be implemented in a future update of the instrument. This paper focuses on the alignment done in the clean room at the LBT facilities for the collimator, camera, and High-layer Wavefront Sensor (HWS) during March and April 2016. It also summarizes the previous work done in preparation for shipping and arrival of the instrument to the telescope. Results are presented for every step, and a final section outlines the future work to be done in next runs until its final commissioning.
© (2016) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Javier Moreno-Ventas , Peter Bizenberger, Thomas Bertram, Kalyan K. Radhakrishnan, Frank Kittmann, Harald Baumeister, Luca Marafatto, Lars Mohr, and Tom Herbst "Final integration and alignment of LINC-NIRVANA", Proc. SPIE 9908, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VI, 99082Y (9 August 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2231690
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KEYWORDS
Telescopes

Mirrors

Sensors

Collimators

Interferometers

Selenium

Calibration

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