The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is currently under construction on Cerro Pachón, in Chile. It was designed to conduct a 10-year multi-band survey of the southern sky with frequent re-visits (with both an intra- and extra-night cadence) to identify transient and moving objects. The mirror cell assembly was designed in Tucson, Arizona by the Rubin Observatory engineering department, and was tested twice in Tucson. The first testing campaign was performed at CAID industries, where the mirror cell was fabricated, using a steel mirror surrogate that has the same geometry and mass of the glass mirror2,4. The glass mirror is a single monolith that contains both the primary and tertiary mirrors on a single substrate. The testing results confirmed that the mirror support system was performing within the design specifications, and that it was safe to install the glass mirror on the cell. The second test campaign was performed at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab of the University of Arizona using the actual glass mirror16. This test campaign was performed under the test tower, which contains a vibration insensitive interferometer to measure mirror figure. This confirmed the mirror support system could achieve proper optical surface figure control for both primary and tertiary mirrors. After successful test campaigns at CAID, and the mirror Lab, the mirror cell assembly was disassembled, packed and shipped to the Rubin Observatory site at the Cerro Pachón summit in Chile. Upon arrival, the mirror cell has been integrated with the mirror surrogate once again to perform the third test campaign that confirmed the system has arrived safe and operational to the summit. This integrated system will be tested on the telescope mount assembly to verify that it still meets it requirements under the effects of variations in gravitational orientation, and dynamic (slewing) loads.
The construction of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is well underway, and when completed the telescope will carry out a precision photometric survey, scanning the entire sky visible from Chile every three days. The photometric performance of the survey is expected to be dominated by systematics; therefore, multiple calibration systems have been designed to measure, characterize and compensate for these effects, including a dedicated telescope and instrument to measure variations in the atmospheric transmission over the LSST bandpasses. Now undergoing commissioning, the Auxiliary Telescope system is serving as a pathfinder for the development of the Rubin Control systems. This paper presents the current commissioning status of the telescope and control software, and discusses the lessons learned which are applicable to other observatories.
The lowest spectroscopic band devised for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), the so-called Band 1,
covers the frequency range from 31 to 45 GHz. This band was not implemented during the rst construction
phase of the telescope, but will be included during a second ALMA development phase. During the past 4
years our group has been working on the development of technology to cover this band, complying with the
demanding ALMA specications. Among the most burdensome challenges are the stringent specications on
noise temperature, the large required bandwidth, and the limited space available for this receiver within the
ALMA cryostat. In this paper we present some of the technologies we have developed, including the design of
key components like horn, lens, ortho-mode transducer, and low noise ampliers. We also present an evaluation
of third-party components which can be used in the receiver. The work is used to present a preliminary layout
of the Band 1 receiver.
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