INNOVATION July-August 2018

match the telescope as it tracks. Doors around the base open to allow airflow through the building to eliminate the heat-difference problem. Baffles shape the wind’s path around the telescope’s main mirror. In addition, “the calotte design allows us to make the enclosure smaller relative to the telescope’s size,” Halliday says. “It also protects the telescope better because we can seal it up and focus on controlling the thermal issues.” With the TMT projected to be finished by the late-2020s, Dynamic Structures is now completing the enclosure’s engineering plans, with drawings scheduled by the end of the year. ADAPTIVE OPTICS ENGINEERING Earth’s atmosphere is a challenge for starlight-gathering telescopes that operate on Earth. As the atmosphere swirls, it causes the starlight passing through to refract and shift. When that twinkling light hits a telescope mirror, the resulting image is a blurry blob that creates problems for astronomers doing research. Engineers in BC are developing technology for the TMT that will remove that twinkle. They are designing an adaptive optics system that will allow the telescope to create images of the universe that are 10 times clearer than, for example, those created by the Hubble Space Telescope. “Adaptive optics measures the optical disturbances introduced through the atmosphere and corrects those in an instrument on the telescope in real time,” says Scott Roberts, P.Eng., with the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre in Victoria, and TMT Systems Engineering Group Leader. Roberts coordinates TMT systems across the entire telescope project to help ensure that, for example, the components Canada provides work flawlessly with the components India, Japan, or the other country-partners provide. “Adaptive optics is the key technology that will enable the TMT to have 100 times the sensitivity of the previous generation of telescopes.” The TMT system, called the narrow field infrared adaptive optics system—or NFIRAOS (pronounced “nefarious”)—that NRC Herzberg engineers are designing focuses on key reference stars, then measures the turbulence in the atmosphere between those stars and the system’s photon detector. “The instrument feeds that information to the adaptive mirrors within the system,” Roberts says. “These mirrors can change shape 800 times each second to adjust for and fix, in real time, the optical aberrations that the atmosphere introduces.” When light from the 30-metre-diameter mirror hits these deformable mirrors, the result will be a sharp, focused image. The system then passes that image to the science instruments that make the measurements astronomers need for their research.

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