Bibcode
Lefort, B.; Castro, J.
Referencia bibliográfica
Advanced Software and Control for Astronomy II. Edited by Bridger, Alan; Radziwill, Nicole M. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 7019, pp. 70190I-70190I-12 (2008).
Fecha de publicación:
8
2008
Número de citas
0
Número de citas referidas
0
Descripción
The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) primary mirror control system is
responsible for making the 36 segments behave like a monolithic mirror.
It deals with 108 positioners giving 3 degrees of freedom to each
segment, 168 position sensors installed between adjacent segments
measuring nanometrical displacements, 216 actuators controling the
figure of each segment creating torques, 216 load cells quantifying the
applied deforming forces and 216 PT100 monitoring the primary mirror
temperature gradient to predict structural dilatations. It provides
simple engineering access to all functionalities of each device as well
as real time capabilities required to work in closed-loop. All the
critical parameters can be monitored from any observatory's workstation
thanks to the fully embedded distributed environment included in the
control system framework. Hardware interfaces as VME, CAN field buses
are fully transparent for the user thanks to the Java front-end
(Inspector) that allows to start, control and turn-off each part of the
system with a simple mouse click.