2014/07/24 by O. Pfuhl, M. Haug, F. Eisenhauer +27
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Actuator #Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing #Advanced optical system design #Astronomical interferometer #Electrical engineering #Engineering #Interferometry #Mechanical engineering #Optical Coherence Tomography Applications #Optics #Physics #Piston (optics) #Telescope #Tilt (camera) #Wavefront #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1117/12.2055080
published as Proc. SPIE 9146, Optical and Infrared Interferometry IV, 914623, 2014 · 14 pages, 13 figures. Proceedings of the SPIE 9146 "Optical and Infrared Interferometry IV"
openalex publication_date 2014/07/24 · arxiv created 2014/12/04 · arxiv updated 2014/12/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present the installed and fully operational beam stabilization and fiber injection subsystem feeding the 2nd generation VLTI instrument GRAVITY. The interferometer GRAVITY requires an unprecedented stability of the VLTI optical train to achieve micro-arcsecond astrometry. For this purpose, GRAVITY contains four fiber coupler units, one per telescope. Each unit is equipped with actuators to stabilize the telescope beam in terms of tilt and lateral pupil displacement, to rotate the field, to adjust the polarization and to compensate atmospheric piston. A special roof-prism offers the possibility of on-axis as well as off-axis fringe tracking without changing the optical train. We describe the assembly, integration and alignment and the resulting optical quality and performance of the individual units. Finally, we present the closed-loop performance of the tip-tilt and pupil tracking achieved with the final systems in the lab.