SSO News

Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue11 1–31 December 2020

Faulty red wiring at the 2.3m

Last year, SSO technical staff discovered faulty red wiring at the ANU 2.3m.  The insulation had become brittle and was starting to expose the bare metal in the wire. An example of how brittle the wire was can be seen in the picture on the right.

All the easily accessible red wire was immediately replaced, leaving the harder to get to wire in the conduits that are all through the building. While the remaining wire in the conduits were not immediately dangerous, we decided to replace that wire too. Last week, we completed the job.

 

New Invar field plates for 2dF

2dF is a pick and place robot that revolutionised astronomy when it was built and installed in 1990’s.  The robot places little buttons to high accuracy on a field plate. The buttons contain tiny prisms that collect the light from astronomical targets and then transmit it down optical fibres to a spectrograph for analysis.  If you don’t know what 2DF is, it is worth looking here to see this amazing piece of engineering in action. Even though the instrument is now 25 years old, it is still in very high demand.   

2DF has had upgrades and improvements over the years.  The latest upgrade is to improve the accuracy of 2DF.  To achieve this, 2DF will be fitted with 2 new invar field plates that have 77 accurately measured fiducials.  The robot looks at the fiducials to determine where to place the fibres. By providing a known highly accurate reference 2DF, will be able to place the fibres with greater accuracy, which will help with the number one objective of all telescopes, i.e. more photons reaching the instruments.

To measure the location of the fiducials we called upon Australian Astronomical Optics at Macquarie University to use their Coordinated Mearing Machine (CMM) with their Point Source Microscope (PSM). With the PSM bolted to the CMM, we achieved an accuracy of 8 microns across the field plate, which corresponds to one twentieth of diameter of the 2dF fibres.  We will install the first of these plates during the next semester.

 

Bon Voyage Matt Spencer and Farewell Steve Lee

Matt Spencer is about to embark on a 14-month expedition to Antarctica. We wish him well, and hope to see him again at SSO when he returns.  

After 40+ years of outstanding service, Steve Lee will be retiring next year. We’ll have a huge farewell for Steve before he retires. We’ll provide details of the farewell early in the new year.

 

From everyone at SSO, have a happy and safe time during the new year break.

 

Your Colleagues at SSO