Authors

Roberto Biasi (1) Daniele Gallieni (2)

Affiliations

(1) Microgate (2) ADS International

Abstract

We present our design of ESO E-ELT M4 deformable mirror and GMT Adaptive Secondary Mirrors unit. Both systems are based on our consolidated design of large deformable mirrors for 8-m class telescopes, successfully implemented on MMT and LBT and currently in advanced construction and testing phase for VLT and Magellan telescopes respectively. We describe the main features of the technology adopted: thin Zerodur mirror shell with contactless voice coil motors, co-located capacitive sensors to close a local position loop at each actuator, centralized control by force feedforward, embedded real time control and communication electronics. We then highlight how the same concept has been scaled up on the E-ELT M4AU and the GMT-ASM cases, adapting the technology to deal with thousands of actuators, while maintaining its intrinsic advantages: tolerance to actuators’ failures, mechanical de-coupling and relaxed tolerances between correcting mirror and reference structure, large stroke, hysteresis-free behavior. For the next generation systems, we report the predicted performances based on the actual results attained on our 1-m class DMs currently in use: the LBT adaptive secondary for the GMT-ASM and the 330 actuators Demonstration Prototype for the E-ELT M4AU.