Wind responses of Giant Magellan telescope

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is 25 meter diameter extremely large ground based infrared/optical telescope being built by an international consortium of universities and research institutions. It will be located at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. The GMT primary mirror consists of seven 8.4 meter diameter borosilicate mirror segments. Two seven segment Gregorian secondary mirror systems will be built; an Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM) to support adaptive optics modes and a Fast-steering Secondary Mirror (FSM) with monolithic segments to support natural seeing modes when the ASM is being serviced. Wind excitation results in static deformation and vibration in the telescope structure that affects alignment and image jitter performance. The telescope mount will reject static and lower frequency windshake, while each of the Fast-steering Secondary Mirror (FSM) segments will be used to compensate for the higher frequency wind-shake, up to 20 Hz. Using a finite element model of the GMT, along with CFD modeling of the wind loading on the telescope structure, wind excitation scenarios were created to study the performance of the FSM and telescope against wind-induced jitter. A description of the models, methodology and results of the analyses are presented.