Primary mirror active control system simulation of Prototype Segmented Mirror Telescope

The upcoming large astronomical telescopes are trending towards the Segmented Mirror Telescope (SMT) technology, initially developed at the W M Keck Observatory in Hawaii, where two largest SMTs in the world are in use. SMT uses large number of smaller hexagonal mirror segments aligned and positioned by the use of three position/force actuators and six intersegment edge sensors. This positioning needs to be done within nanometer range to make them act like a monolithic primary mirror in the presence of different disturbances like wind, vibration & thermal effects. The primary mirror active control system of SMT does this important task at two levels. First at a global scale, by measuring edge sensor information continuously and commanding actuators to correct for any departure from the reference surface. And second at local actuator level, where all the actuators maintain their position to the reference control inputs. The paper describes our novel approach of primary mirror active control simulation of Prototype Segmented Mirror Telescope (PSMT) under design and development at Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bangalore. The PSMT is a 1.5m segmented mirror telescope with seven hexagonal segments, 24 inductive edge sensors, and 21 soft actuators. The state space model of the soft actuator with Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) capability is developed to incorporate dynamic wind disturbances. Further, a segment model was developed using three such actuators which accept actuator position commands from the global controller and telescope control system and yields tip-tilt-piston (TTP) of a single segment. A dynamic wind disturbance model is developed and used to disturb the mirror in a more realistic way. A feed forward PID controller is implemented, and gains are appropriately tuned to get the good wind rejection. In the last phase, a global controller is implemented based on SVD algorithm to command all the actuators of seven segments combined to act as a single monolithic mirror telescope. In this paper, we present the progress of PSMT active control system simulation along with the simulation results.