The Thirty Meter Telescope site testing system
Abstract
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) site testing team are developing a suite of instruments to measure the atmospheric and optical characteristics of candidate TMT sites. Identical sets of robotically operating instruments will be placed at each candidate site. The fully developed system will comprise of a combined MASS/DIMM. a SODAR, tower mounted thermal probes and a portable DIMM. These instruments have overlapping altitude coverage and provide a measure of the C^2_n profile from the ground up with sufficient resolution to make conclusions about the ground layer and high altitude turbulence characteristics. The overlapping altitude coverage is essential to ensure consistency between these very different instruments. In addition to checking for consistency in the overlap regions, procedures are being used to cross check between instruments, i.e. the calculation of the isoplanatic angle from both the MASS and DIMM and that the integrals of the C^2_n profiles from the MASS, SODAR and 30m tower gives the same r0 value as measured by the DIMM. We discuss a variation of the traditional DIMM system in which we employ a continuous drift mode readout technique giving a maximum of nearly 300 samples per second. Findings of our major equipment testing campaigns and first field deployment are presented that demonstrate our progress in developing a rigorous approach to site testing.
Additional Information
© 2004 Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) Project is a partnership of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy (ACURA), the California Institute of Technology and the University of California. The partners gratefully acknowledge the support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the US National Science Foundation, the National Research Council of Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Gemini Partnership. We thank the many personnel, particularly the CTIO staff, that have assisted with the development and deployment of the TMT site testing equipment and whose help has been and will continue to be vital for this project.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 87755
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20180711-105225741
- Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA)
- Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy (ACURA)
- Caltech
- University of California
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- NSF
- National Research Council of Canada
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- Gemini Partnership
- Created
-
2018-07-11Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Thirty Meter Telescope
- Series Name
- Proceedings of SPIE
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 5489