Moore Foundation grantees at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a prototype system, designed as a test for a planned array of 5,000 galaxy-seeking robots.
Dubbed ProtoDESI, the scaled-down, 10-robot system will help scientists achieve the pinpoint accuracy needed to home in on millions of galaxies, quasars and stars with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) planned for the Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Ariz. ProtoDESI will be installed on the Mayall Telescope this August and September.
The full DESI project, which is managed by Berkeley Lab, involves about 200 scientists and about 45 institutions from around the globe. DESI will provide the most detailed 3-D map of the universe and probe the secrets of dark energy, which is accelerating the universe’s expansion. It is also expected to improve our understanding of dark matter, the infant universe, and the structure of our own galaxy.
The thin, cylindrical robots that will be tested in ProtoDESI each carry a fiber-optic cable that will be precisely pointed at selected objects in the night sky in order to capture their light. A predecessor galaxy-measuring project, called BOSS, required the light-gathering cables to be routinely plugged by hand into metal plates with holes drilled to match the position of pre-selected sky objects. DESI will automate and greatly speed up this process.
Each 10-inch-long robot has two small motors in it that allow two independent rotating motions to position a fiber anywhere within a circular area 12 millimeters in diameter. In the completed DESI array, these motions will enable the 5,000 robots to cover every point above their metal, elliptical base, which measures about 2.5 feet across.
That requires precise, software-controlled choreography so that the tightly packed robots don’t literally bump heads as they spin into new positions several times each hour to collect light from different sets of pre-selected sky objects.
While DESI’s robots will primarily target galaxies, ProtoDESI will use mostly bright, familiar stars to tune its robotic positioning system and ensure the system is accurately tracking with the motion of objects in the sky.
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