Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
Abstract
CCAT1 is a submillimeter telescope currently under development that will be located at an altitude of 5600 meters in the Andes mountains of northern Chile. The atmospheric transmission at this site will allow CCAT to achieve high sensitivity over a wide field of view and a broad wavelength range to provide an unprecedented capability for deep, large area multicolor submillimeter surveys. In order to achieve high aperture efficiencies out to frequencies of ~ 1 THz, the 162 individual panels that form the 25 meter aperture of CCAT must be aligned to a tolerance of a few microns rms. The design of a wavefront sensor to achieve this goal is presented