New Mexico State University owns and operates a one-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory (APO) in southern New Mexico. This telescope is fully robotic and scientifically active, monitoring the light curves of cataclysmic variables, brown dwarfs, and supernovae discovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The telescope is in need of refurbishment. As a result, its operation will be made more reliable and new instrumentation and capabilities will be made available.
Work packages that will be undertaken will: (1) Improve the usage to greater than 90% of all clear nights, through increased manpower (including the use of a graduate student to share primary responsibility for operations), improvements to some critical under-engineered subsystems, and the purchase of basic spare parts. (2) Integrate a new, existing, 2048x2048 CCD (built in collaboration with Los Alamos National Labs) into the telescope to allow wider-field operation with a detector with sufficiently low dark current to allow for narrow-band imaging, and to replace our current tiny guide camera with a new CCD camera. (3) Improve performance via improvements in optical alignment and improved guiding software. (4) Improve optical performance and allow for simultaneously mounting a second instrument by constructing a new rotating tertiary with actuated control of rotation, translation, tip, and tilt. (5) Construct a high-speed photometer for the second Nasmyth port to allow high time-resolution photometry simultaneously in five colors.
The renovated telescope will be used for a number of research projects, including programs in narrow-band imaging, rapid-response follow-up to high energy transits (including those from SWIFT), monitoring of known extrasolar planet systems for transits, searches for periodic and quasi-periodic variability in interacting binaries, pulsating white dwarfs, and the optical counterparts of high-energy transients, etc. Up to 20% of the telescope time available to the community through queue scheduled observations, including the possibility of target-of-opportunity observations, through an internally review program. Additional time will be made available for external scientists who propose projects in collaboration with NMSU personnel.
The renovation efforts will provide graduate and undergraduate students with both engineering and research opportunities, including instrument design and deployment, as well as software development. Use of the telescope will be more reliably integrated into existing astronomy classes and the 1-m will be incorporated into an on-campus program aimed at under-represented middle and high school students in science.
This award is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities.
New Mexico State University owns and operates a fully robotic 1 meter telescope at the Apache Point Observatory near Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Funding was sought from the NSF PREST program to upgrade this telescope, and make it more reliable. Among the major initiatives were 1) to implement a redisign of the tertiary mirror mount to allow for access to the second (Nasmyth) port, 2) build a new high speed photometer ("HSP"), and 3) improve the robustness of the various mechanical components. Besides allowing for acess to the second Nasmyth port, the home of the HSP, the new tertiary mount design also allowed for a much simpler optical alignment procedure to improve image quality. To aid in optical component alignment, a "Shack-Hartmann" wavefront sensor was purchased with these funds that has allowed us to dramatically improve the telescope's image quality. A major component of the PREST effort was to design, build and deploy a new multi-channel high speed photometer that employed "avalanche photodiode detectors" ("APDs"). Except for the optical design, the entire instrument was designed, built, and deployed by undergraduate engineering students at NMSU. This includes the computer software used to control the instrument, that also records the data. This instrument simultaneously obtains data in five visual channels. It can record light variations that occur on a time scale of 0.01 seconds. With supplementary funding, we were able to add a sixth channel to the instrument. This channel extends the instrument's wavelength coverage into the near-infrared by using an Indium-Arsenic-Gallium APD. As far as we know, this is the first device of its kind to be deployed for astronomical photometry. With the purchase of several narrow-band filters, the HSP can simultaneously obtain data in both broadband ("continuum") and narrowband filters, allowing one to investigate stellar activity, the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets, and numerous other astronomical sources where high speed, multi-band coverage is needed. Over the course of our PREST project more than a dozen graduate and undergraduate students were employed on various aspects of this project, providing valuable training in the design and construction of a scientific instrumentation. The upgrades to the NMSU 1 m telescope that were enabled with the funding from the NSF PREST program will allow NMSU students and faculty to obtain valuable astronomical observations for years to come.
