Search

We describe diamond-turned material tests for the integral field unit (IFU) for the FRIDA instrument (inFRared Imager and Dissector for the Adaptive optics system of the Gran Telescopio Canarias). FRIDA is closely based on the design of the successful FISICA cryogenic infrared image slicing device, which used "monolithic" mirror arrays, diamond turned into single pieces of metal. FRIDA, however, will require better roughness characteristics than the 15nm RMS of FISICA to avoid light scatter in FRIDA's shorter wavelength limit (900nm). Al 6061 seems to be limited to this roughness level by its silicate inclusions so some new combination of materials that are compatible with FRIDA's Al 6061 structure must be found. To this end, we have tested six diamond-turned mirrors with different materials and different platings. We used the Zygo interferometer facility at IA-UNAM to do warm and cold profile measurements of the mirrors to investigate possible bimetallic deformation effects. We present a detailed comparison of the various performance characteristics of the test mirrors.

COATLI will provide 0.3 arcsec FWHM images from 550 to 900 nm over a large fraction of the sky. It consists of a robotic 50-cm telescope with a diffraction-limited fast-guiding imager. Since the telescope is small, fast guiding will provide diffraction-limited image quality over a field of at least 1 arcmin and with coverage of a large fraction of the sky, even in relatively poor seeing. The COATLI telescope will be installed at the at the Observatorio Astron\'omico Nacional in Sierra San Pedro M\'artir, M\'exico, during 2016 and the diffraction-limited imager will follow in 2017., Comment: To appear in the proceedings of SPIE conference 9908 "Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VI". 9 pages