The 4m class New Robotic Telescope (NRT) is an optical facility designed to revolutionize the rapid follow-up and classification of variable and transient objects. The project is at the stage where key systems are progressing through their detailed design phases, which presents a major engineering challenge for all project partners to manage design progress of the high-level interfacing systems while still ensuring the delivery of top-level science requirements. The freezing of key system architecture features at the preliminary design review in 2021 has allowed significant progress to be made towards a target of Engineering First Light (EFL) in 2027. The project critical path is currently driven by the optics and the enclosure. Both of these components are novel in design: the NRT will have an 18-segment primary mirror and a large, fully-opening clamshell enclosure. Particular progress has been made regarding enclosure design, software & control, science & operations software and the focal station and associated science support instrumentation. The Critical Design Review for the M3 (fold mirror) was completed Q4 2022 which enabled manufacturing of the first NRT glassware to begin and prototyping of the complete opto-mechanical, hardware and software subsystem for its control to take place. The NRT will join the 2m Liverpool Telescope on La Palma, and as such this existing facility has been exploited to prototype the new science operations user interface and the NRT wavefront sensor.
The 2-metre Liverpool Telescope will soon be assisted by the New Robotic Telescope (NRT), a 4-metre-class telescope, robotic and fully autonomous, at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM) on La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain. The 4-metre primary mirror of the NRT will be comprised of 18 hexagonal segments of 1-meter diameter each. All the individual segments need to be sufficiently aligned to deliver images that can be successfully exploited by the telescope instrumentation. We therefore need an instrument to assist in the alignment of the different segments. To that end, we designed a wavefront sensor that would be not only reliable and robust (indispensable for a robotic telescope), but also economical, and therefore with as many on-the-shelf components as possible. We chose a Shack-Hartmann type of wavefront sensor, that rests on the use of a lenslet array. The assembly of segments can be mapped onto the array imaged at the image plane by the lenslet array. This will allow us not only to detect the misalignment of each segments with respect to the other segments, but also the misalignment of the primary mirror with respect to the secondary mirror. From these information, the position of the primary mirror segments and of the secondary mirror can be altered. A prototype Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor for the NRT has been tested in the laboratory and also on the 2-m Liverpool Telescope. We demonstrate that the basic functionality requirements are met. Detailed analysis of the images is currently underway.
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