The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) with a collecting area of 4pi square meters will be the largest fully robotic telescope in the world. This contribution is focused on the design of the telescope control system, summarizing the state of the art and proposing a software architecture and a development roadmap that reflects the needs and requirements for this facility. This pioneering effort for a large robotic telescope aims also to provide standards for future similar facilities.
The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) will be the largest fully robotic telescope in the world (4-m class). The primary mirror (M1) will be comprised of 18 independent 960 mm hexagonal segments with an actively controlled position to maintain the shape of the optical surface. The secondary mirror (M2) will be a lightweighted circular mirror of 1270 mm of diameter. This contribution presents the conceptual design and preliminary results of the M1 segment support assembly and a first study of two lightweighted substrate candidates for the M2 mirror.
The robotic 2-metre Liverpool Telescope (LT), located at Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, has seen great success in its <15 year lifetime. In particular the facility thrives in time domain astronomy, responding rapidly to triggers from Swift and efficiently conducting a wide variety of science with its intelligent scheduler. The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) will be a 4-metre class, rapid response, autonomous telescope joining the Liverpool Telescope on La Palma in ~2025. The NRT will slew to targets and start observations within 30 seconds of receipt of a trigger, allowing us to observe faint and rapidly fading transient sources that no other optical facility can capture. The NRT will be the world’s largest optical robotic telescope. Its novel, first-generation instrumentation suite will be designed to conduct spectroscopic, polarimetric and photometric observations driven by user requirements.
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