An Integrated Approach to the design of a 4-m Survey Telescope (VISTA) and its instrumentation

摘要

The design of VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) requires close interaction between the science requirements, the optical and active mechanical design of the telescope and its instrumentation with the wavefront sensing. The optical design is based on an integrated approach of the telescope with two separate cameras, one working in the IR waveband and the other working in the Visible waveband. The large field of view (2 degrees in the visible and 1.65 degrees in the IR) , the seeing-limited resolution required (FWHM of 0.4 arcsec for the visible and 0.5 arcsec for the IR) , the technological advance in active telescopes and large IR arrays and the f/1 quasi Ritchey-Chretien telescope design, makes this telescope a very powerful tool in performing high resolution and large astronomical surveys. A system analysis, modelling the various sources of errors such as optical aberrations, surface errors, alignment errors, control errors, environmental effects and detector effects is presented in this paper.