Wide Aperture Exoplanet Telescope: a low-cost flat configuration for a 100+ meter ground based telescope

Benjamin Monreal, Christian Rodriguez, Ama Carney, Rob Halliday, Mingyuan Wang
(Submitted on 2 Jan 2018)

The Wide Aperture Exoplanet Telescope (WAET) is a ground-based optical telescope layout in which one dimension of a filled aperture can be made very, very large (beyond 100 m) at low cost and complexity. With an unusual beam path but an otherwise-conventional optics, we obtain a fully-steerable telescope on a low-rise mount with a fixed gravity vector on key components. Numerous design considerations and scaling laws suggest that WAET can be far less expensive than other giant segmented mirror telescopes.

Comments:    14 pages, 8 figures
Subjects:    Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as:    arXiv:1801.00822 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1801.00822v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Benjamin Monreal
[v1] Tue, 2 Jan 2018 20:24:13 GMT (3038kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00822