An active reflector antenna using a laser angle metrology system

Abstract

Active reflector is one of the key technologies for constructing large telescopes, especially for the millimeter/sub-millimeter radio telescopes. This article introduces a new efficient laser angle metrology system for the active reflector antenna of the large radio telescopes, with a plenty of active reflector experiments mainly about the detecting precisions and the maintaining of the surface shape in real time, on the 65-meter radio telescope prototype constructed by Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology (NIAOT)⋆ . The test results indicate that the accuracy of the surface shape segmenting and maintaining is up to micron dimension, and the time-response can be of the order of minutes. Therefore, it is proved to be workable for the sub-millimeter radio telescopes.

An adjustment method for active reflector of large high-frequency antennas considering gain and boresight

“…It is necessary for the antenna to compensate the performance by adjusting the spatial position and changing the geometrical shape of the distorted reflector surface. An implementation of active surface adjustment is shown in Figure 2, 43-2 C. S. Wang et al: An Adjustment Method for Active Reflector which is the most effective way to compensate performance of the antenna (Hans & Jacob 2014, Zhang et al 2012.…”