Alignment of 4-mirror Wide Field Corrector for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope

摘要

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) Wide Field Corrector (WFC) is a four-mirror optical system which corrects for aberrations from the 10-m segmented spherical primary mirror. The WFC mirror alignments must meet particularly tight tolerances for the system to meet performance requirements. The system uses 1-m class highly aspheric mirrors, which precludes conventional alignment methods. For the WFC system alignment a "center reference fixture" has been used as the reference for each mirror's vertex and optical axis. The center reference fixtures have both a CGH and sphere mounted retroreflector (SMR) nests. The CGH is aligned to the mirror's optical axis to provide a reference for mirror decenter and tilt. The vertex of each mirror is registered to the SMR nests on the center reference fixtures using a laser tracker. The spacing between the mirror vertices is measured during the system alignment using these SMR nest locations to determine the vertex locations. In this paper the procedures and results from creating and characterizing these center reference fixtures are presented. As a verification of proposed alignment methods the results from their application in the WFC system alignment are also presented.