Precise Mirror Control
About Us
Our team has paired with the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer (NPOI) to develop a new communication and control system for their siderostat mirrors. NPOI, the world's highest precision optical interfereometer is operated by USNO (United States Naval Observatory), NRL (Navy Research Laboratory), and Lowell Observatory.
NPOI's primary interest is in high-precison astrometry, which is the measurement of position, motion, and magnitude of stars. While improvements in single-telescope technology have been constant over the past few decades, increasing astrometric potential requires creating a larger telescope, which exponentially increases cost and complexity as size increases. NPOI's design is a non-traditional design, utilizing an array of small telescopes and combining their images together. The result of this technology is a telescope about 200 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope, and this is achieved with an operating cost of only $400,000. Below is an arial image of NPOI, showing the distribution of telescopes across the Y-formation. Find out more about NPOI from Lowell's website or here.
To make this technology work, each telescope on the array must be operating in unison with other telescopes to observe the same object, and each telescope station requires controlling two mirrors with two axes of motion. Mirror corrections which allow for tracking stars happen automatically so that astronomers are able to focus on data collection. To make those automatic corrections happen, a computer at each station receives feedback and calculates adjustments to the mirrors. Unfortunately, the current system is facing critical hardware failures, and NPOI has used this opportunity to commission a redesign to replace their system. Instead of individualized stations, their idea is to have one central computer which performs all the calculations, then distributes corrections to individual stations. The concept for this was orignally provided for by Jim Clark, the current director of NPOI, and can be found here. To learn more about the project and our solution, click here. To read our relevant documentation, click here.
