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Large aperture mirror array (LAMA): project overview.

Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

The Large Aperture Mirror Array (LAMA) is a novel concept for an extremely-large telescope. In the current design, light from 66 individual 6.15-meter telescopes would be coherently combined at a common focus. This would give the array the light-gathering power of a 50-meter telescope and the resolving power of a 70-meter telescope. The optics and beam combiner preserve the sine condition, providing interferometric imaging over an extended field of view. The concept is unique in that pointing and tracking is accomplished entirely by secondary optical systems: the primary mirrors are fixed in both position and orientation. This allows rotating liquid-metal primary mirrors to be employed, substantially reducing the project cost. At a 30-degree latitude, the tracking system provides access to approximately 2500 square degrees (6% of the sky) and allows individual fields to be observed for up to 35 min per night. The telescope would be initially equipped with a multi-band optical/infrared imaging camera and a high-resolution optical spectrograph. Copyright 2004 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited.

Text

2011-09-20

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/37487

Hickson, Paul; Lanzetta, Kenneth M. Large aperture mirror array (LAMA): project overview. Second Backaskog Workshop on Extremely Large Telescopes, edited by Arne L. Ardeberg, Torben Andersen Proceedings of SPIE Volume 5382, 115, 2004.

Reviewed

Hickson, Paul

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