E-ELT: TELESCOPE DESIGN

E-ELT design

Telescope status

The telescope is in a detailed design phase and as of November 2008 has succesfully passed its third Baseline Reference Design (BRDv3). A summary of its characteristics can be found below, as well as links to more detailed documents.

The telescope structure

The E-ELT is designed as a Nasmyth telescope. It has a footprint of about 80m diameter and is about 60m high. The altitude and azimuth structures weigh together nearly 5000 tons. This structure supports the five mirror optical design and accomodates two Nasmyth platforms. Each platform is of about the size of a tennis court and can host several instruments.
Several designs were considered for the telescope enclosure. The project settled for a rather classical dome design.

A five mirror optical design

The E-ELT optical design differs from other ELT designs mostly by including adaptive optics into the telescope. This drove the optical layout to five mirrors: a three mirror anastigmat with two flat folding mirrors providing the adaptive optics. This novel five-mirror design results in an exceptional image quality, with no significant aberrations in the 10 arcmin field of view.


Links