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The OMI telescope mount is designed to have high
performance and carry a minimum thermal footprint. The designers
after carefully looking at the different mount and drive options
have decided upon a one tyne fork equatorial mount with a dual
harmonic drive. Since the OTA is very light (~200 kg) a one tyne
fork becomes feasible. The mount has a low mass, thus minimizing
thermal issues and can track an object pass the meridian/zenith
unlike a German Equatorial or Altitude/Azimuth which cannot. This
will increase the scientific throughput of the instrument. Our
fork design will fully integrate all the moving components inside
the fork for protection and resistance to dirt/dust.
The dual harminic drive has many advantages over
other drive types. It offers great pointing precision and high
tracking accuracy, in addition the drive has no backlash, high
stiffness, good smoothness with low amplitude long duration periodic
error. We are expecting less than 10 arcsec rms pointing error
and potentially inthe 2-3 arcsec range.
The OMI one tyne equatorial fork mount.
THE MOUNT KEY FEATURES
- Fully autonomous
- Low mass to minimize the thermal footprint, ~200 Kg.
- Single arm fork configuration
- High torque DC servo motors.
- <10 arcseconds rms pointing accuracy (zenith to Z-60 deg).
- 4 degrees per second maximum slew rate.
- 0.05/0.05 arcsecond motor/encoder tracking accuracy.
- <2 arcsecond peak-to-peak periodic error, 20 minutes.
- Software flexibility for sophisticated tracking abilities.
- Vented to achieve rapid thermal equilibrium.
- Dual harmonic Declination (DEC) and Right Ascension (RA) drives.
- Non backlash drive.
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