Status and Plans for the Large Binocular Telescope

Physics – Optics

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) is in commissioning, with the initiation of science operations planned for 2007. The telescope contains two 8.4-m diameter borosilicate honeycomb primary mirrors, supported actively to control bending modes. The secondary mirrors will provide adaptive optics correction through rapid modulation of the surface of a Zerodur face sheet 91 cm in diameter and 1.5 mm thick. The initial complement of facility instruments comprises capabilities used in pairs on common fields of view. The Large Binocular Cameras are wide-field 36 Mpix mosaics at prime focus optimized for blue and for red performance. The Multi-Object Double Spectrographs will be fed at straight-through Gregorian foci through custom cut focal plane masks. The ambitious LUCIFER near-IR spectrographs at bent Gregorian will have exchangeable cold focal plan masks. Ultimately, two instruments will combine the two beams through Fizeau interferometry. One, LBTI, is optimized for mid-IR, and will have a nulling capability for coronagraphic work. The other, LINC-NIRVANA, will employ three levels of adaptive correction to achieve interferometric resolution down to 1 micron. The 23-m tip-to-tip dimension affords resolution as good as 10 mas. LBTO is supported by a consortium of institutions from Arizona, Italy, Germany, and the U.S. It is truly an international project and the first of the next generation of large ground-based telescopes.

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