Fiber optic hydrophones typically use a long sensor fiber wrapped around an air-filled mandrel to achieve high responsivity. Minimum mandrel diameter is determined by fiber reliability considerations. A miniature hydrophone, with diameter of about a third that of previous hydrophones, is reported. Such a hydrophone has applications for very thin towed arrays. Small diameter fiber with high strength Bragg gratings written through the coating are key enablers.
The Segment Alignment Maintenance System (SAMS) was installed on McDonald Observatory's Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in August 2001. The SAMS became fully operational in October 2001. The SAMS uses a system of 480 inductive edge sensors to correct misalignments of the HET's 91 primary mirror segments when the segments are perturbed from their aligned reference positions. A special observer estimates and corrects for the global radius of curvature (GRoC) mode, a mode unobservable by the edge sensors. The SAMS edge sensor system and GRoC estimator are able to maintain HET's primary figure for longer durations than previously had been observed. This paper gives a functional description of the SAMS control system and presents performance verification data.
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