After several months of assembly and testing in our maintenance facility, the second unit telescope has been mated with its enclosure. The next step is to move the combined assembly to the interferometer array for installation next to UT#1.
Have you ever seen a custom telescope enclosure (dome) being assembled? Here is your chance! Click on the image above to go to our UTE#2 Assembly Time Lapse Video page!
How do you unpack and move a 15 ton telescope? Very carefully! February 21 was not only a cold and snowy Tuesday, but it was an exciting Tuesday for the staff of the MRO Interferometer. The second Unit Telescope which had arrived in January was going to be unpacked and installed in its temporary home in the Maintenance Facility at the Observatory. The 1.4 meter telescope, which was designed and built by AMOS, is the second of the eventual ten optical telescopes that will make up the MRO Optical Interferometer. After many hours of unpacking and moving, the telescope was […]
The second Unit Telescope (UT) of the MRO Interferometer, which was designed and built by AMOS, is currently undergoing its site acceptance testing in our maintenance facility. Below are two short time lapse videos of part of the process of testing the pointing accuracy.
The second Unit Telescope (UT) of the MRO Interferometer was delivered to the Observatory on January 13, 2023. Transporting such a large package up the narrow dirt road was no small feat! Most of the twists and turns in the road are so tight that the large truck carrying our second telescope could barely make the turns. This made the trip up to the Observatory a long a laborious process. We started up the mountain around 9 AM with the expectation that it would take two or three hours to complete the trip. That turned out to be a vast […]