AMOS SA has been awarded of the contract for the design, manufacturing, assembly, tests and on site installation (Devasthal, Nainital in central Himalayan region) of the 3.6 m Indo-Belgian Devasthal Optical Telescope (IDOT). The telescope has a Ritchey-Chrétien optical configuration with a Cassegrain focus equipped with one axial port and two side ports. The primary mirror is a meniscus active mirror. The mount is an Alt-Az type with for the azimuth axis a 5 m diameter hydrostatic track. This paper presents the solution adopted by AMOS to meet the specific requirements for the azimuth axis. The track is designed to be able to control the positioning of the telescope around the azimuth axis with an accuracy of 0.05 arc second for all tracking configurations. The challenge came from this tight accuracy with a mass in rotation weighting 125 tons. The azimuth track was mounted and tested in AMOS workshop; the tests and performances are also discussed.
The Salto demonstrator is a complete 1-m class telescope with a single-conjugated Rayleigh laser guide star adaptive optics (AO) system. The project aims to benchmark robust AO operations for astronomy giving an opportunity to upgrade medium size telescopes (1-4 m diameter) around the world and boost their scientific yield. But it is also a benchmark for optical communications and space debris tracking under mediocre seeing conditions, far worse than astronomical standards. Indeed, the foreseen location of the telescope is at the premises of Redu Space Services in the Belgian countryside. In our contribution, we review the overall design of the AO instrument from the optical definition to the real-time computer implementation. We discuss the integration, the calibration, and operational aspects of the instrument. Finally, we present the successful first on-sky operations, reaching the diffraction limit at 1.55µm under 2-3" seeing.
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