Control software for honeycomb mirrors

Abstract

Several large telescopes with light weighted honeycomb mirrors have been commissioned in the last few decades. The control software for a honeycomb mirror is generally implemented by directly referring to legacy source code of previous generation telescopes. This approach can hinder clear development and improvement of control software for future telescopes with honeycomb mirrors. Hence in this paper the core software functionalities for the control of the honeycomb mirror are presented. We provide motivation for these functionalities which then leads to improvement of some of the core software control routines. We give a detailed description of support system software. For the thermal control system, an overview is provided for some key software functions. The description is independent of the software development process and environment imposed by a particular observatory. Hence, the software description provided in this paper can be used for software development of any honeycomb mirror control system. © 2020 SPIE.