Verification of the optical system of the 9.7-m prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope
Abstract
For the first time in the history of ground-based x-ray astronomy, the on-axis performance of the dual mirror, aspheric, aplanatic Schwarzschild-Couder optical system has been demonstrated in a 9:7-m aperture imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope. The novel design of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT) is motivated by the need of the next-generation Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) observatory to have the ability to perform wide (>=8°) field-of-view observations simultaneously with superior imaging of atmospheric cascades (resolution of 0:067 per pixel or better). The pSCT design, if implemented in the CTA installation, has the potential to improve significantly both the x-ray angular resolution and the off-axis sensitivity of the observatory, reaching nearly the theoretical limit of the technique and thereby making a major impact on the CTA observatory sky survey programs, follow-up observations of multi-messenger transients with poorly known initial localization, as well as on the spatially resolved spectroscopic studies of extended x-ray sources. This contribution reports on the initial alignment procedures and point-spread-function results for the challenging segmented aspheric primary and secondary mirrors of the pSCT.
- Publication:
-
Optical System Alignment, Tolerancing, and Verification XIII
- Pub Date:
- August 2020
- DOI:
- 10.1117/12.2568134
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2010.13027
- Bibcode:
- 2020SPIE11488E..05A
- Keywords:
-
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics;
- High Energy Physics - Experiment
- E-Print:
- 19 pages, 11 figures, proceedings for SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2020, Online Only