A Decade of Cost-Reduction in Very Large Telescopes (The SST as Prototype of Special-Purpose Telescopes)

Abstract

Many design and technical innovations over the past ten or fifteen years have reduced the costs of very large telescopes by nearly an order of magnitude over those of’classical’ designs. Still a further order of magnitude reduction is possible if the telescope is specialized for on-axis spectroscopy, giving up especially the luxuries of wide field, multiple focal positions, and access to all the sky at will. The SST (Spectroscopic Survey Telescope) will use eighty-five 1 m circular mirrors mounted in a steel frame composed of hundreds of interlocking tetrahedrons, keeping a fixed elevation angle of 60° with rotation only in azimuth. Using an optical fiber it will feed as much light to spectrographs as can be done by a conventional 8 m telescope, yet has a target basic completion cost of only $ 6 million.

Paper presented at the Symposium on the JNLT and Related Engineering Developments, Tokyo, November 29-December 2, 1988.