An active reflector is one of the key technologies for constructing large telescopes, especially for millimeter/sub-millimeter radio telescopes. This article in- troduces a new efficient laser angle metrology system for an active reflector antenna on large radio telescopes. Our experiments concentrate on developing an active reflec- tor for improving the detection precisions and the maintenance of the surface shape in real time on the 65-meter prototype radio telescope constructed by Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology （NIAOT; http：//65rn.shao.cas.cn/）. The test results indicate that the accuracy of the surface shape segmentation and maintenance has the dimensions of microns, and the time-response can be on the order of minutes. Our efforts proved to be workable for sub-millimeter radio telescopes.
Yong ZhangJie ZhangDe-Hua YangGuo-Hua ZhouAi-Hua LiGuo-Ping Li
A 30-m TeraHertz（THz） radio telescope is proposed to operate at 200 μm with an active primary surface.This paper presents sensitivity analysis of active surface panel positioning errors with optical performance in terms of the Strehl ratio.Based on Ruze＇s surface error theory and using a Monte Carlo simulation,the effects of six rigid panel positioning errors,such as piston,tip,tilt,radial,azimuthal and twist displacements,were directly derived.The optical performance of the telescope was then evaluated using the standard Strehl ratio.We graphically illustrated the various panel error effects by presenting simulations of complete ensembles of full reflector surface errors for the six different rigid panel positioning errors.Study of the panel error sensitivity analysis revealed that the piston error and tilt/tip errors are dominant while the other rigid errors are much less important.Furthermore,as indicated by the results,we conceived of an alternative Master-Slave Concept-based（MSC-based） active surface by implementating a special Series-Parallel Concept-based（SPC-based） hexapod as the active panel support mechanism.A new 30-m active reflector based on the two concepts was demonstrated to achieve correction for all the six rigid panel positioning errors in an economically feasible way.
