Final tests and performances verification of the European ALMA antennas

摘要

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) is under erection in Northern Chile. The arrayconsists of a large number (up to 64) of 12 m diameter antennas and a number of smaller antennas,to be operated on the Chajnantor plateau at 5000 m altitude. The antennas will operate up to 950GHz so that their mechanical performances, in terms of surface accuracy, pointing precision anddimensional stability, are very tight.The AEM consortium constituted by Thales Alenia Space France, Thales Alenia Space Italy,European Industrial Engineering (EIE GROUP), and MT Mechatronics is assembling and testing the25 antennas. As of today, the first set of antennas have been delivered to ALMA for science.During the test phase with ESO and ALMA, the European antennas have shown excellentperformances ensuring the specification requirements widely.The purpose of this paper is to present the different results obtained during the test campaign:surface accuracy, pointing error, fast motion capability and residual delay. Very important was alsothe test phases that led to the validation of the FE model showing that the antenna is working with agood margin than predicted at design level thanks also to the assembly and integration techniques.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.