Design of the Giant Magellan Telescope

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is a 25.4-m diameter, optical/infrared telescope that is being built by an international consortium of universities and research institutions as one of the next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes. The primary mirror of GMT consists of seven 8.4 m borosilicate honeycomb mirror segments that are optically conjugate to seven corresponding segments in the Gregorian secondary mirror. Fabrication is complete for one primary mirror segment and is underway for the next two. The final focal ratio of the telescope is f/8.2, so that the focal plane has an image scale of 1.0 arcsec/mm. GMT will be commissioned using a fast-steering secondary mirror assembly comprised of conventional, rigid segments to provide seeing-limited observations. A secondary mirror with fully adaptive segments will be used in standard operation to additionally enable ground-layer and diffraction-limited adaptive optics. In the seeing limited mode, GMT will provide a 10 arcmin field of view without field correction. A 20 arcmin field of view will be obtained using a wide-field corrector and atmospheric dispersion compensator. The project has recently completed a series of sub-system and system-level preliminary design reviews and is currently preparing to move into the construction phase. This paper summarizes the technical development of the GMT sub-systems and the current status of the GMT project.

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“…It is described further below. A recent update on the telescope structure in general can be found in Johns et al 6 . Proc.…”

Section: Telescope Structurementioning

confidence: 98%

Overview and status of the Giant Magellan Telescope project

Bernstein

McCarthy

Raybould³

et al. 2014

SPIE Proceedings

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“…Papers in prior proceedings have described the design of the telescope mount, bearings, drives and other subsystems. 18,19 The structure is a compact altitude-over-azimuth configuration using large C-ring elevation bearings and a dual azimuth track. A third degree of motion is provided by the Gregorian instrument rotator, which performs image de-rotation for the various science instruments and houses the AGWS equipment.…”

Section: Telescope Design Statusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Overview and status of the Giant Magellan Telescope project

Fanson¹,

Bernstein

Angeli³

et al. 2020

Ground-Based and Airborne Telescopes VIII

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“…In the recent years the need for technological progress in astronomy has been growing faster and faster, leading to more demanding surveys in terms of mechanical and optical complexities, such as the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), The Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor (LUVOIR), etc [1][2][3]. Thus, the necessity of developing innovative systems that allow to reduce complexities, dimensions and costs without impacting the performances has become imperative.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Curved detectors for astronomical applications: characterization results on different samples

et al. 2019

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Due to the increasing dimension, complexity and cost of the future astronomical surveys, new technologies enabling more compact and simpler systems are required. The development of curved detectors allows to enhance the performances of the optical system used (telescope or astronomical instrument), while keeping the system more compact. We describe here a set of five curved CMOS detectors developed within a collaboration between CEA-LETI and CNRS-LAM. These fully-functional detectors 20 Mpix (CMOSIS CMV20000) have been curved to different radii of curvature and spherical shapes (both convex and concave) over a size of 24x32 mm 2 . Before being able to use them for astronomical observations, we assess the impact of the curving process on their performances. We perform a full electro-optical characterization of the curved detectors, by measuring the gain, the full well capacity, the dynamic-range and the noise properties, such as dark current, readout noise, pixel-relative-non-uniformity. We repeat the same process for the flat version of the same CMOS sensor, as a reference for comparison. We find no significant difference among most of the characterization values of the curved and flat samples. We obtain values of readout noise of 10e − for the curved samples compared to the 11e − of the flat sample, which provides slightly larger dynamic ranges for the curved detectors. Additionally we measure consistently smaller values of dark current compared to the flat CMOS sensor. The curving process for the prototypes shown in this paper does not significantly impact the performances of the detectors. These results represent the first step towards their astronomical implementation.

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Design of the Giant Magellan Telescope

Cited by 12 publications

References 7 publications

Overview and status of the Giant Magellan Telescope project

Overview and status of the Giant Magellan Telescope project

Overview and status of the Giant Magellan Telescope project

Curved detectors for astronomical applications: characterization results on different samples

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