Beam control for LINC-NIRVANA: from the binocular entrance pupil to the combined focal plane

摘要

LINC-NIRVANA is the near-infrared interferometric imaging camera for the Large Binocular Telescope. Once operational, it will provide an unprecedented combination of angular resolution, sensitivity and field of view.To meet the tight requirements that result from long exposure interferometric imaging over a large field of view, active control beyond fringe tracking and adaptive optics has to be in place in the telescope and in the instrument domain. The incoming beams of the binocular telescope have to be controlled along the entire optical path, from the entrance pupil to the combined focal plane. The beams have to coincide in the focal plane of the science detector, their pointing origins, offsets, orientations, plate scales, and distortions have to match each other and must not change during the observation. Non-common path effects between AO and science channel, flexure and thermal effects have to be compensated and offioading requests from the adaptive optics and fringe tracking systems have to be arbitrated without introducing unwanted optical path length differences or changes in the geometry of the binocular entrance pupil.Beam Control aspects include pointing, co-pointing and field derotation, active optics and collimation control. In this presentation, the constraints for coherent imaging over a 1.5 arcminute field of view are discussed together with a concept for a distributed control scheme.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.