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 Exoplanet High-Resolution Spectrograph (EXOhSPEC) is a high-resolution spectrograph for the characterisation of exoplanets with the Thai National Telescope. The folded version of this instrument comprises one triplet lens to collimate the beam incident on the grating and to focus the beam reflected by the grating onto the camera. This collimator comprises three lenses L1, L2 and L3 of diameter varying between 50 mm and 60 mm. We specified the barrel to guarantee a maximum decenter of the lenses equal to 25 μm. The maximum error in the orientation of each single lens is specified to be lower than 0.03º. The proposed concept is based on a semi-kinematic mounting which is used to restrain these lenses with 6 and 30 N of preloads on the axial and lateral directions to ensure their stability. These preloads are applied to the lenses using the elastic pushing force of silicone elastomers and spring force from ball-plungers. We present the design of the collimator and the assembly method. Our Finite Element Analyses show that the maximum surface error induced by the preloads is lower than 60 nm Peak-To-Valley on each optical surface of L1, L2, and L3. We describe our manufacturing process using NARIT’s CNC machine and its validation using our Coordinate-Measuring Machine.
The EXOplanet high resolution SPECtrograph (EXOhSPEC) instrument is an echelle spectrograph dedicated to the detection of exoplanets by using the radial velocity method using 2m class telescopes. This spectrograph is specified to provide spectra with a spectral resolution R < 70, 000 over the spectral range from 400 to 700 nm and to reach a shortterm radial velocity precision of 3 m/s. To achieve this the separation between two adjacent spectral orders is specified to be greater than 30 pixels and to enable a wide range of targets the throughput of the instrument is specified to be higher than 4%. We present the results of the optimization of the spectrograph collimator performed and initial tests of its optical performance. First, we consider the spectrograph design and we estimate its theoretical performance. We show that the theoretical image quality is close to the diffraction limit. Second, we describe the method used to perform the tolerancing analyzes using ZEMAX software to estimate the optical performance of the instrument after manufacturing, assembly and alignment. We present the results of the performance budget and we show that the estimated image quality performance of EXOhSPEC are in line with the specifications. Third, we present the results of the stray light analysis and we show that the minimum ratio between the scientific signal and the stray light halo signal is higher than 1,000. Finally, we provide a status on the progress of the EXOhSPEC project and we show the first results obtained with a preliminary version of the prototype.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.