In the last couple of years, the Rubin telescope and site subsystem has made tremendous progress and overcome a few challenges. The insulated cladding on the dome is done and work is now focused on finishing the louvers, weatherproof cladding, interior work, light baffles, and the final fabrications. This has been done concurrently with the installation of the telescope mount, now mostly complete and approaching the beginning of functional testing in September-October, 2022. While work is being done on these two major subsystems, other major components and systems are being integrated and tested in a system spread configuration: M1M3 & M2 mirrors, the camera hexapod/rotator and the control software, including elements of the active optics control and the commissioning camera. Finally, the calibration system - an important contributor to achieving the exquisite photometry required by the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) - is being finalized.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is now under construction on Cerro Pachon in Chile. This ground-based facility is designed to conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which is a decade-long time-domain optical survey of the night sky. The system aberrations introduced by temperature gradients, hysteresis and other non-predictable errors can prevent the telescope from delivering a consistently high-quality image over its 3.5 degrees field of view, necessary to the LSST scientific goals. Therefore, the active optics system (AOS) uses a combination of an open-loop and a closed-loop correction. The AOS open-loop is planned to correct for typical gravity variations while the AOS closed-loop will correct the real-time (within 30s) system aberrations. The components used for this task consist mainly of: two mirrors with active support systems (M1M3 and M2), two hexapods and curvature wavefront sensors integrated to the focal plane of the science detector. By the beginning of 2019, both M1 and M3 mirrors had been extensively tested using interferometry techniques, providing necessary measurements to refine our Finite Element models. This will help to achieve higher image quality when integrating all mirrors on the telescope. Progress has also been made on the active optics pipeline, which allows for conversion of the wavefront sensor images into corrective data for the mirrors and hexapods. In this paper, we will present the main results from the mirror testing as well as predicted performance of the AOS using these results. Finally, we will discuss the test plan for commissioning the AOS on the telescope.
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