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The week of September 18th, 2006, NTE has delivered in Chile the Secondary Mirror Drive System (M2U) for the VISTA Telescope. The M2U has been designed, integrated and verified by NTE together with the Swiss and Italian subcontractors CSEM and ADS. This system drives a 1.2m and 240 Kg mirror with micrometric precision in order to compensate the thermal and gravitational deformations of the telescope structure.
VISTA is a 4 meter class wide field survey telescope for astronomical observation in the visible and infrared, hosted at Cerro Paranal Observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile. VISTA together with the four 8 m class VLT telescopes and their auxiliary telescopes constitutes the main astronomical observatory in the world, built and managed by the European Southern Observatory ESO consisted of 11 countries and Spain, that has recently joined.
The delivery of the M2U has been successfully completed at VISTA premises at Cerro Paranal at 2.600 m, verifying the system functionality after the road and maritime transport that lasted for one month and integrating the M2U at its interface in the telescope structure.
The supply of high precision pointing systems for large telescopes like GTC or VISTA and the one that is being built for IRAIT telescope in the Antarctica, places NTE as a world leader in large high precision pointing systems. |
