The 4m class New Robotic Telescope (NRT) is an optical facility designed to revolutionize the rapid follow-up and classification of variable and transient objects. The project is at the stage where key systems are progressing through their detailed design phases, which presents a major engineering challenge for all project partners to manage design progress of the high-level interfacing systems while still ensuring the delivery of top-level science requirements. The freezing of key system architecture features at the preliminary design review in 2021 has allowed significant progress to be made towards a target of Engineering First Light (EFL) in 2027. The project critical path is currently driven by the optics and the enclosure. Both of these components are novel in design: the NRT will have an 18-segment primary mirror and a large, fully-opening clamshell enclosure. Particular progress has been made regarding enclosure design, software & control, science & operations software and the focal station and associated science support instrumentation. The Critical Design Review for the M3 (fold mirror) was completed Q4 2022 which enabled manufacturing of the first NRT glassware to begin and prototyping of the complete opto-mechanical, hardware and software subsystem for its control to take place. The NRT will join the 2m Liverpool Telescope on La Palma, and as such this existing facility has been exploited to prototype the new science operations user interface and the NRT wavefront sensor.
The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) is an autonomous telescope that can operate multiple instruments at the Cassegrain focal station and the straight-through port. The optical beam is directed to the ports by a fold mirror subsystem in the focal station assembly. The fold mirror is elliptical in shape, manufactured by Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), and polished down to RMS surface deformation of λ/20. An optomechanical analysis is performed to simulate the effect of gravity over the mirror surface deformation and the results have been compared to the interferometry plots to optimize the Ion Beam Figuring (IBF) process to polish the mirror aperture. The mirror assembly is supported by a bipod flexure design to reduce surface deformation under gravity and thermal loads. There are three sets of bipod elements and a central support in the quasi-kinematic support structure. Using wire EDM, the bipods were manufactured precisely as one piece. Following careful preparation and the development of multiple glue jigs to ensure an even glue thickness, the bipods, and central pads are glued to the mirror, and multiple experimental tests have been performed to ensure the glue layer's strength and durability. Other components of the mirror assembly, such as the mirror cell, mirror stand, and moving platform, are being machined out of INVAR, assembled, and mounted on the linear stage and a rotary stage before being installed over the mechanism platform in the A&G box. The design and manufacturing of the mirror assembly, including the gluing process, will be summarised as part of this article.
We present Mookodi (meaning “rainbow” in Sesotho), a multipurpose instrument with a low-resolution spectrograph mode and a multi-filter imaging mode for quick-reaction astronomical observations. The instrument, mounted on the 1-m Lesedi telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Sutherland (South Africa), is based on the low-resolution spectrograph for the rapid acquisition of transients (SPRAT) instrument in operation on the 2-m Liverpool Telescope in La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain). Similar to SPRAT, Mookodi has a resolution R≈350 and an operating wavelength range in the visible (∼4000 to 8000 Å). The linear optical design, as in SPRAT, is made possible through the combination of a volume phase holographic transmission grating as the dispersive element and a prism pair (grism), which makes it possible to rapidly and seamlessly switch to an imaging mode by pneumatically removing the slit and grism from the beam and using the same detector as in spectrographic mode to image the sky. This imaging mode is used for auto-target acquisition, but the inclusion of filter slides in Mookodi’s design also provides the capability to perform imaging with a field-of-view ≈10′×10′ (∼0.6″/px) in the complete Sloan Digital Sky Survey filter set.
The New Robotic Telescope will be a fully autonomous, rapid reaction, primarily spectroscopic facility for the classification of astronomical transients. The 4.18m diameter primary mirror is to be composed of 18 hexagonal mirror segments, arranged with a secondary mirror that feeds the Cassegrain focal stations with an F/10.635 beam. The final telescope design does not follow an established prescription, although both primary and secondary remain hyperbolic. However, the tube length is retained from an earlier F/7.5 RC design and secondary mirror size reduced to minimise obscuration of the primary. The optimisation process involved considering the M2 / fold size trade-off while solving the surfaces for image quality, contrast and wavefront error after speeding up the primary mirror. The final effective focal ratio is then slower to allow for workable tolerances through manufacture, installation and operations. In this presentation the optimisation process, trade-offs, tolerances and final design will be summarised.
The New Robotic Telescope will be 4-meter class telescope with a fast response time (less than 30 seconds) as its primary design target. To achieve this, enough structural stiffness and a quick settling time are key factors. Over the last year, important updates to the structure have been carried out. The biggest update consists of changing the tube from a Serrurier Truss to a Multibay Truss, a tube that is more common in bigger telescopes, which provides more stiffness at a lower weight, enabling better drive performance and low settling times. A new design of the M1 Cell has also been designed, as well as updating some key parts of the structure in response to the optical specification update, that has changed from f/7.5 to f/10.6. Here we present these updates to the structure, and a parametric PyMAPDL model that allows rapid iteration over the different design parameters. Based on this finite element model, we show the preliminary static, modal, and dynamic analyses, that outline the behaviour of the design. The static analysis shows low deformations, which will allow good optical performance once the telescope is pointed at a target. Meanwhile, the modal and dynamic analyses show promising results regarding vibration, pointing and tracking performance, which will enable the telescope to move quickly enough to respond to quickly fading transient events.
The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) conceptual design has been developed to include an autonomous multi-instrument adaptor at the Cassegrain focal station. The focal station assembly is to consist of a field rotator to compensate the earth rotation, cable wrap, instrument adaptor, support structure, and a fold mirror mechanism to bring the telescope optical beam to the instruments. The design supports the use of multiple instruments around the Acquisition and Guidance box (A&G box) a single instrument port is located at the bottom of the box at the straight through port. The A&G box also includes an autoguider which will be mounted at the side of the box and fed a portion of the optical beam via a small pick off mirror. It will use a field outside that of usable the science field, and has been designed to comprise of off-the-shelf lenses, camera system and lens tubes to minimise cost. The field of view is large enough to conduct ‘blind autoguiding’ at an accuracy of 0.2” with the 4m class telescope. The entire assembly will then be mounted to the M1 cell, forming the bottom part of the telescope tube held between the telescope mount forks. The focal station assembly design will be summarised in this paper.
The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) will be the largest fully robotic telescope in the world (4-m class). The primary mirror (M1) will be comprised of 18 independent 960 mm hexagonal segments with an actively controlled position to maintain the shape of the optical surface. The secondary mirror (M2) will be a lightweighted circular mirror of 1270 mm of diameter. This contribution presents the conceptual design and preliminary results of the M1 segment support assembly and a first study of two lightweighted substrate candidates for the M2 mirror.
The robotic 2-metre Liverpool Telescope (LT), located at Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, has seen great success in its <15 year lifetime. In particular the facility thrives in time domain astronomy, responding rapidly to triggers from Swift and efficiently conducting a wide variety of science with its intelligent scheduler. The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) will be a 4-metre class, rapid response, autonomous telescope joining the Liverpool Telescope on La Palma in ~2025. The NRT will slew to targets and start observations within 30 seconds of receipt of a trigger, allowing us to observe faint and rapidly fading transient sources that no other optical facility can capture. The NRT will be the world’s largest optical robotic telescope. Its novel, first-generation instrumentation suite will be designed to conduct spectroscopic, polarimetric and photometric observations driven by user requirements.
The New Robotic Telescope is designed to conduct rapid target follow-up within 30 seconds of an ‘alert’ from survey facilities. To achieve this will require a quick settling time requirement for the mount structure and the mirrors. This means the structure shall be designed to be sufficiently rigid to achieve the mirror position within the ‘settle time’ after a quick slew operation. An optimization analysis using the finite element model is developed to conceptually design the mount structure that meets the mechanical and more importantly the NRT science requirements. The main objective of this study is to determine the required locked rotor resonance frequency (LRF) that provides enough rigidity for the telescope dynamic performance while minimizing the structural mass and cost.
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