A Fiber Positioner Robot for the Gran Telescopio Canarias

TL;DR

This paper presents the design, development, and testing of a novel fiber positioner robot for the Gran Telescopio Canarias, aiming to improve the efficiency of fiber-fed spectrographs in astronomical observations.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable actuator array design for fiber positioning, validated through a real-scale prototype and comprehensive testing procedures.

Findings

Prototype successfully meets mechanical requirements

Design enables rapid, simultaneous fiber positioning

Validation confirms the concept's viability for large telescopes

Abstract

Fiber-fed spectrographs dedicated to observing massive portions of the sky are increasingly being more demanded within the astronomical community. For all the fiber-fed instruments, the primordial and common problem is the positioning of the fiber ends, which must match the position of the objects of a target field on the sky. Amongst the different approaches found in the state of the art, actuator arrays are one of the best. Indeed, an actuator array is able to position all the fiber heads simultaneously, thus making the reconfiguration time extremely short and the instrument efficiency high. The SIDE group (see http://side.iaa.es) at the Instituto de Astrof\'isica de Andaluc\'ia, together with the industrial company AVS and the University of Barcelona, has been developing an actuator suitable for a large and scalable array. A real-scale prototype has been built and tested in order to validate its innovative design concept, as well as to verify the fulfillment of the mechanical requirements. The present article describes both the concept design and the test procedures and conditions. The main results are shown and a full justification of the validity of the proposed concept is provided.