The Greenland Telescope (GLT): Antenna status and future plans
Abstract
The ALMA North America Prototype Antenna was awarded to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in 2011. SAO and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics (ASIAA), SAO's main partner for this project, are working jointly to relocate the antenna to Greenland to carry out millimeter and submillimeter VLBI observations. This paper presents the work carried out on upgrading the antenna to enable operation in the Arctic climate by the GLT Team to make this challenging project possible, with an emphasis on the unexpected telescope components that had to be either redesigned or changed. Five-years of inactivity, with the antenna laying idle in the desert of New Mexico, coupled with the extreme weather conditions of the selected site in Greenland have it necessary to significantly refurbish the antenna. We found that many components did need to be replaced, such as the antenna support cone, the azimuth bearing, the carbon fiber quadrupod, the hexapod, the HVAC, the tiltmeters, the antenna electronic enclosures housing servo and other drive components, and the cables. We selected Vertex, the original antenna manufacturer, for the main design work, which is in progress. The next coming months will see the major antenna components and subsystems shipped to a site of the US East Coast for test-fitting the major antenna components, which have been retrofitted. The following step will be to ship the components to Greenland to carry out VLBI and single dish observations. Antenna reassembly at Summit Station should take place during the summer of 2018.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1407.4902,
title = {The Greenland Telescope (GLT): Antenna status and future plans},
author = {Philippe Raffin and Juan Carlos Algaba-Marcos and Keichi Asada and Raymond Blundell and Roberto Burgos and Chih-Cheng Chang and Ming-Tang Chen and Robert Christensen and Paul K. Grimes and C. C. Han and Paul T. P. Ho and Yau-De Huang and Makoto Inoue and Patrick M. Koch and Derek Kubo and Steve Leiker and Ching-Tang Liu and Pierre Martin-Cocher and Satoki Matsushita and Masanori Nakamura and Hiroaki Nishioka and George Nystrom and Scott N. Paine and Nimesh A. Patel and Nicolas Pradel and Hung-Yi Pu and H. -Y. Shen and William Snow and T. K. Sridharan and Ranjani Srinivasan and Edward Tong and Jackie Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.4902},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
10 pages, 8 figures