Abstract
The use of aspheric mirrors is a common practice to design astronomical telescopes with a few optical elements. In the most preferred optical design Ritchey Chretien (RC), both primary and secondary mirrors are hyperboloid. Nowadays large telescopes are being built using small mirror segments, however, making aspheric off-axis mirror segments is still a challenge. We have conducted a study in which, we explored the possibility to mimic an aspheric hyperbolic primary mirror by making use of smaller spherical mirror segments. Three different methods have been used to form a large segmented aspheric primary of nearly 12m aperture. In the first method, fixed ROC(radius of curvature) spherical mirror segments are reconfigured by a piston, tip, and tilt (PTT). In the other two methods, in addition to PTT, ROC of the segments are also varied. We further attempted to reduce the telescope wave-front error by varying the segment size and the F ratio of the primary. We found out that none of these three methods provided acceptable image quality unless we incorporate the warping harness in the segment support. The use of the warping harness emulated by Zernike coefficient correction, remarkably reduced the wave-front error and delivered a decent image quality over a large field of view. In this paper, we present the results of our study on designing an RC type optics for a 12m class optical-NIR(Near Infrared) telescope using spherical mirror segments.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the support received from Dr. Sreekumar P., Prof. Jayant Murthy and Prof. Anupama G.C. of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA). Without their regular encouragement and support, it would have been difficult to complete this work. Thanks to Mr.Sriram S. for his help in the ZEMAX related analysis. We would also like to extend our thanks to Sreekanth Reddy, Varun Kumar and Prasanna Deshmukh of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. We also acknowledge Mr. Arjun Krishna P R and Mr. Rakesh Khanna for their help while developing the algorithm used in segmentation .
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Appendix
Appendix
The best fit radius of curvature is found for each segment using matrix inversion techniques for a set of (x,y,z) coordinates corresponding to the chosen segment.
where xc, yc, zc are the coordinates of the center of the sphere, and Rb is the radius of the best fit sphere. We can form following matrix equations as
and
Where, xi, yi, zi are the data points on the aspheric surface and
Therefore, the solution for the center of the best fit sphere can be obtained by matrix inversion as follows
Once the center of the best fit is known then the best fit radius of curvature Rb can be derived
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Jacob, A., Parihar, P. & James, M.K. Creating a large aspheric primary mirror using spherical segments. Exp Astron 50, 51–71 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-020-09663-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-020-09663-y