Wide Aperture Exoplanet Telescope: a low-cost flat configuration for a 100+ meter ground based telescope

Abstract

The Wide Aperture Exoplanet Telescope (WAET) is a ground-based optical telescope layout in which one dimension of a filled aperture can be made very, very large (beyond 100 m) at low cost and complexity. With an unusual beam path but an otherwise-conventional optics, we obtain a fully-steerable telescope on a low-rise mount with a fixed gravity vector on key components. Numerous design considerations and scaling laws suggest that WAET can be far less expensive than other giant segmented mirror telescopes.

Research overview

The Wide Aperture Exoplanet Telescope concept combines an asymmetric filled aperture with a beam path designed to simplify the supporting structure. The paper develops the configuration and examines the design considerations and scaling that motivate it.

Cite this work

Benjamin Monreal, Christian Rodriguez, Ama Carney, Robert Halliday, Mingyuan Wang. Wide Aperture Exoplanet Telescope: a low-cost flat configuration for a 100+ meter ground based telescope. Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 4(2), 024001 (2018). 10.1117/1.JATIS.4.2.024001.

@article{wang2018wideapertureexoplanettelescope,
  title = {{Wide Aperture Exoplanet Telescope: a low-cost flat configuration for a 100+ meter ground based telescope}},
  author = {Benjamin Monreal and Christian Rodriguez and Ama Carney and Robert Halliday and Mingyuan Wang},
  year = {2018},
  journal = {Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems},
  volume = {4},
  number = {2},
  pages = {024001},
  eprint = {1801.00822},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass = {astro-ph.IM},
  doi = {10.1117/1.JATIS.4.2.024001},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.4.2.024001}
}

Related research

Earlier telescope-design research at Case Western Reserve University