Safran Reosc was awarded the manufacturing of the Secondary Mirror of the Extremely Large Telescope by ESO in 2016. The secondary mirror is a 4-meter convex mirror, the world’s largest convex precision mirror ever made. As of spring 2024, this mirror is in its final phase of polishing. It is regularly controlled on a dedicated interferometric test bench (ITB) specifically designed to achieve the best accuracy on such a large mirror. The test bench was thoroughly validated in September 2023 and all its requirements were demonstrated. This bench includes a convex-concave test plate together with a unique custom interferometer system, both specifically designed and manufactured for this test bench. In fact, the specific requirements of this very large mirror forbid the use of off-the-shelf component or interferometer and it was necessary to design a specific interferometer to cope with all the requirements. Furthermore, it was necessary to manufacture an almost perfect 2-m reference plate to control the mirror. It took about 3 years to manufacture this reference plate with the requested accuracy. The test bench makes a measurement on 24 sub-pupils which are stitched together to reconstruct the final surface error. The full aperture measurement and the map stitching lasts around 2 hours. Specific sensors are used to monitor the stitching process and the stitching algorithm had to be adapted in order to fulfil the stringent performance requirements. In this paper, we present the main features of the bench, the alignment strategy, the test results obtained on the bench and the stitching algorithm developed to reconstruct the surface error.
In the past 20 years, a new generation of telescopes with large primary mirrors has appeared, based on the segmented mirrors design. The Thirty meter Telescope and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Extremely Large telescope (ELT) are now under construction. They have, respectively, a 30m aperture and a 39m aperture. To cope with these apertures, they both have a large monolithic secondary mirror. These two convex aspherics are the TMT secondary mirror, a 3.1 m convex hyperboloid, and the ELT secondary mirror, a 4.25 m diameter aspheric with an asphericity of 2 mm. The surface measurement of these mirrors is challenging and auxiliary optics, like Test Plates (TP) and Computer Generated Holograms , are needed. In this paper, we present the Interferometry Test Bench, designed at Safran Reosc to polish and validate the ELT secondary mirror (ELT M2). The test bench is composed of three main components: a temporal phase shift interferometer, a Test Plate and the ELT M2 mirror on its polishing support. We perform interferometry between the concave face of the test plate and the mirror surface, forming an analogue to a Fizeau interferometer. The interferometer, named IRIDE, was designed and manufactured by Safran Reosc. It is a temporal phase shift interferometer, where environmental vibrations are addressed by increasing the interferograms acquisition rate. The interferometer has a low coherence light source, to reduce parasitic fringes. The Test Plate is a ZERODUR® meniscus lens fabricated at Safran Reosc. . Its concave surface is an off-axis isophase portion of the ELT M2 mirror and it is the Fizeau cavity’s reference surface. The ELT M2 mirror blank is mounted on its support for metrology and polishing (SMP). The SMP supports the mirror blank and interfaces it with the turning table. A measurement of the entire ELT M2 clear aperture is composed of 12 sub pupils measurements.
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