GRAVITY: the Calibration Unit [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6660


We present in this paper the design and characterisation of a new sub-system of the VLTI 2nd generation instrument GRAVITY: the Calibration Unit. The Calibration Unit provides all functions to test and calibrate the beam combiner instrument: it creates two artificial stars on four beams, and dispose of four delay lines with an internal metrology. It also includes artificial stars for the tip-tilt and pupil guiding systems, as well as four metrology pick-up diodes, for tests and calibration of the corresponding sub-systems. The calibration unit also hosts the reference targets to align GRAVITY to the VLTI, and the safety shutters to avoid the metrology light to propagate in the VLTI-lab. We present the results of the characterisation and validtion of these differrent sub-units.

Read this paper on arXiv…

N. Blind, F. Eisenhauer, M. Haug, et. al.
Fri, 25 Jul 14
43/57

Comments: 12 pages, 11 figures. Proceeding of SPIE 9146 “Optical and Infrared Interferometry IV”