Active maintenance of a segmented mirror based on edge and tip sensing

An 8 m ring aperture segmented telescope is one of the important elements of the Chinese Giant Solar Telescope (CGST) project. In addition, active control of the primary mirror has become a key technology of the 8 m ring solar telescope (8 m RST). Due to the particularity of the ring aperture, the active maintenance of the segmented RST faces the following problem: edge detection cannot provide enough information to fulfil the closed-loop control. A scheme of using edge and tip detection to complete the active maintenance of an 8 m RST has been proposed. To study the feasibility and performance of edge detection combined with tip detection, we built a workbench of a two-segmented mirror and carried out an active maintenance analysis and experiment. Two capacitive sensors were used to detect the edge height change between the segments, and a Shack–Hartmann sensor was used to detect the tip and tilt change of the segment. A stable mirror figure was achieved during 100 min, and the mirror figure error was maintained at 18.94 nm. This work will provide reference for the implementation of the active control for a segmented ring telescope and also give evidence for the choice of the primary mirror of the CGST.