Developments for coating, testing, and aligning Cherenkov Telescope Array mirrors in T\"ubingen

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and testing of mirror coating, alignment, and quality assurance procedures for the Cherenkov Telescope Array, a large-scale gamma-ray observatory with thousands of segmented mirrors.

Contribution

It presents new procedures for coating, testing, and aligning CTA mirrors, including prototype development for active control systems.

Findings

Successful development of mirror coating procedures

Progress in mirror prototype testing and alignment mechanics

Plans for future system enhancements

Abstract

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation very-high energy gamma-ray air-shower Cherenkov observatory. CTA will consist of many segmented-mirror telescopes of three different diameters, placed in two arrays, one in the Northern hemisphere and one in the South, thus covering the whole sky. The total number of mirror tiles will be of the order of 10000, corresponding to a reflective area of ~10^4 m^2. The Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in T\"ubingen is developing procedures to coat glass-substrate-based mirror tiles, is participating to the CTA mirror prototype testing, and is prototyping Active Mirror Control alignment mechanics, electronics and software. We will present the current status of our work and plans for future developments.