The drive system of the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope

Abstract

The MAGIC telescope is an imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope, designed to observe very high energy gamma-rays while achieving a low energy threshold. One of the key science goals is fast follow-up of the enigmatic and short lived gamma-ray bursts. The drive system for the telescope has to meet two basic demands: (1) During normal observations, the 72-ton telescope has to be positioned accurately, and has to track a given sky position with high precision at a typical rotational speed in the order of one revolution per day. (2) For successfully observing GRB prompt emission and afterglows, it has to be powerful enough to position to an arbitrary point on the sky within a few ten seconds and commence normal tracking immediately thereafter. To meet these requirements, the implementation and realization of the drive system relies strongly on standard industry components to ensure robustness and reliability. In this paper, we describe the mechanical setup, the drive control and the calibration of the pointing, as well as present measurements of the accuracy of the system. We show that the drive system is mechanically able to operate the motors with an accuracy even better than the feedback values from the axes. In the context of future projects, envisaging telescope arrays comprising about 100 individual instruments, the robustness and scalability of the concept is emphasized.

15 pages, 12 (10) figures, submitted to Astroparticle Physics, a high resolution version of the paper (particularly fig. 1) is available at http://publications.mppmu.mpg.de/2008/MPP-2008-101/FullText.pdf

References in corpus (4)

• Very-High-Energy Gamma Rays from a Distant Quasar: How Transparent Is the Universe?
• Observation of Pulsed Gamma-rays Above 25 GeV from the Crab Pulsar with MAGIC
• MAGIC upper limits on the very high energy emission from GRBs
• Status of the second phase of the MAGIC telescope

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Performance of the MAGIC stereo system obtained with Crab Nebula data
• Design and Operation of FACT -- The First G-APD Cherenkov Telescope
• Discovery of a very high energy gamma-ray signal from the 3C 66A/B region
• Broadband characterisation of the very intense TeV flares of the blazar 1ES 1959+650 in 2016
• Observations of the Blazar 3C 66A with the MAGIC Telescopes in Stereoscopic Mode
• Feasibility of utilizing Cherenkov Telescope Array gamma-ray telescopes as free-space optical communication ground stations
• MAGIC sensitivity to millisecond-duration optical pulses
• FACT -- the First Cherenkov Telescope using a G-APD Camera for TeV Gamma-ray Astronomy (HEAD 2010)
• Contributions to free-space optical communications: feasibility of utilizing Cherenkov telescopes as receivers and beam-wander correction in quantum communications