Motivated by the ever increasing pursuit of science with the transient sky (dubbed Time Domain Astronomy or TDA), we are fabricating and will commission a new deployable tertiary mirror for the Keck I telescope (K1DM3) at the W.M. Keck Observatory. This paper presents the detailed design of K1DM3 with emphasis on the opto-mechanics. This project has presented several design challenges. Foremost are the competing requirements to avoid vignetting the light path when retracted against a sufficiently rigid system for high-precision and repeatable pointing. The design utilizes an actuated swing arm to retract the mirror or deploy it into a kinematic coupling. The K1DM3 project has also required the design and development of custom connections to provide power, communications, and compressed air to the system. This NSF-MRI funded project is planned to be commissioned in Spring 2017.
@article{arxiv.1609.02060,
title = {Detailed Design of a Deployable Tertiary Mirror for the Keck I Telescope},
author = {J. Xavier Prochaska and Chris Ratliff and Jerry Cabak and Alex Tripsas and Sean Adkins and Michael Bolte and David Cowley and Mike Dahler and Will Deich and Hilton Lewis and Jerry Nelson and Sam Park and Michael Peck and Drew Phillips and Mike Pollard and Bill Randolph and Dale Sanford and Jim Ward and Truman Wold},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.02060},
year = {2017}
}