Micropositioning systems to aid space studies
A
Lambda Photometrics product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Apr 18, 2006
Physik Instrumente has been awarded a contract by Vertex Antenna Systems to provide 25 six-axis hexapod alignment systems and motion controllers.
Physik Instrumente (PI) has been awarded a contract by Vertex Antenna Systems, a daughter of General Dynamics C4 Systems, to provide 25 six-axis hexapod alignment systems and motion controllers.
Each of the custom high-precision micropositioning systems will be employed to align the secondary reflectors in one of the 12m telescopes that make up the North American portion of the Atacama Large Millimetre Array Project (ALMA) radio telescope.
ALMA is an international joint effort to build the world's most sensitive radio telescope, in Chile's Atacama Desert, 5km above sea level.
Eventually, an array of up to 64 antennas will work together as one giant virtual telescope and provide a spatial resolution 10 times higher than the Hubble Space Telescope.
After its completion in 2011, the telescope will allow scientists to observe galaxies in their formative stages with unmatched clarity.
PI was chosen as a supplier for the secondary alignment systems, because of its long track record with designing and manufacturing astronomical hexapods, actuators and active optics.
In the last two decades, PI systems have been employed in a number of astronomical telescopes, for example in Hawaii, Chile, South Africa and the Canary Islands.
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