AN OVERVIEW OF THE ACTIVE OPTICS CONTROL STRATEGY FOR THE THIRTY METER TELESCOPE

The primary (M1), secondary (M2) and tertiary (M3) mirrors of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), taken together, have over 10,000 degrees of freedom. The vast majority of these are associated with the 492 individual primary mirror segments. The individual segments are converted into the equivalent of a monolithic thirty meter primary mirror via the Alignment and Phasing System (APS) and the Primary Mirror Control System (M1CS). In this paper we first provide an introduction to the TMT. We then describe the overall optical alignment and control strategy for the TMT and follow up with additional descriptions of the M1CS and the APS. We conclude with a short description of the TMT error budget process and provide an example of error allocation and predicted performance for wind induced segment jitter.