Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope construction at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Arizona
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The image above is a capture of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder telescope on-site at Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory. The image updates automatically every 60 seconds.
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The Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope
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The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) project is an initiative to build the next generation ground-based very high energy gamma-ray observatory, consisting of over 100 telescopes at two array sites. It will serve as an open observatory to a wide astrophysics community and will provide a deep insight into the non-thermal high-energy universe.
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The U.S. members of the CTA collaboration have pioneered the development of an innovative Schwarzschild-Couder telescope (SCT) based on the dual-mirror optical system first proposed by Karl Schwarzschild in 1905. It is designed to achieve a performance in CTA close to the theoretical limit of the technique. The prototype of the SCT (pSCT), now built at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory adjacent to the VERITAS telescopes, will serve as a pathfinder medium-sized telescope (MST) for CTA. The MST array of SCTs in CTA is expected to significantly improve the angular resolution and dramatically improve the off-axis sensitivity of the observatory when compared to an MST array of conventional (VERITAS-like) Davies-Cotton Telescopes (DCTs).
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The first of its kind in the history of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs), the pSCT uses a secondary mirror to correct comatic aberrations and achieve an aplanatic optical system with 8° wide field of view (FoV). The largest FoV of any IACT currently in operation is <5° (the FoV of VERITAS is 3.5° ). The demagnifying secondary mirror of the SCT improves imaging and significantly reduces the focal plane plate scale compared to the DCT. This permits the construction of a high imaging resolution, 0.8m diameter camera of the SCT with 11,328 pixels of 0.067°, while the equivalent DCT version of the MST is assembled from 1,570 pixels of 0.18° in a camera of 2.3m in diameter. The small plate scale of the SCT camera is compatible with novel silicon photo-multipliers (SiPMs), which are significantly less expensive than the traditional photomultiplier tubes used in the DCT (and VERITAS). It is thus possible to construct the SCT camera at roughly the same or even reduced cost.
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SCT Performance in CTA
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The advantages of the SCT for CTA are derived from the superior imaging resolution of its optical system in the wide 8° FoV. The fraction of all detected atmospheric cascades with the shower core inside or near the footprint of the MST array in CTA is significantly larger than for a four-telescope array such as VERITAS. The reconstruction of the arrival direction of the γ-rays which initiated these cascades is greatly improved when using SCTs, ultimately leading to better angular resolution. Compared to VERITAS, the on-axis angular resolution of the MST array of DCTs in CTA is greater by a factor of 1.4, while an SCT-based MST array offers an improvement of up to a factor of 2. This enhancement of γ-ray angular resolution increases further for off-axis observations of astrophysical sources.
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The differential off-axis point source sensitivity benefits dramatically from the improved angular resolution of an SCT-based MST array, which reduces the exposure time required for achieving a given sensitivity for a source at 3.5° off axis by more than factor of 2 (for an on-axis source the exposure reduction is up to 40%). This enhancement in CTA performance offered by the SCT has direct scientific implications on the detection of large angular-extent sources, sky surveys, as well as follow-up observations triggered by multi-messenger instruments (such as IceCube and LIGO-VIRGO) with relatively poor initial source localization.
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Mission Statement
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CTA Project Team
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Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope construction at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Arizona
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The CTA project is an initiative to build the next generation ground-based very high energy gamma-ray instrument.
+ It will serve as an open observatory to a wide astrophysics community and will provide a deep insight into the non-thermal
+ high-energy universe. This image automatically reloads.
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Have questions?
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If you have any questions about the construction of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope or would like to contact
+ a member of the team, please click the button to send us an email.
Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope construction at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Arizona
+
The CTA project is an initiative to build the next generation ground-based very high energy gamma-ray instrument.
+ It will serve as an open observatory to a wide astrophysics community and will provide a deep insight into the non-thermal
+ high-energy universe. This image automatically reloads.
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Have questions?
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam eget nisl vel justo suscipit ullamcorper sed at lacus.
+ Aliquam euismod nunc id eros sollicitudin interdum.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin non odio sed eros tristique bibendum. Nunc quis semper sem.
+ Morbi libero elit elementum quis faucibus ac, condimentum quis nibh.
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Recent News
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin non odio sed eros tristique.
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Mission Statement
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin non odio sed eros tristique.
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CTA Project Team
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The pSCT project was made possible by funding provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation program, by the contributions of other partner U.S. and international funding agencies, and by the efforts of thirty institutions and five key industrial partners across the United States, Italy, Germany, Japan, and Mexico.
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Time-lapse videos showcasing the construction process of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope.
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+The installation of the secondary mirror (M2) on the telescope took place from July to August 2018. M2 consists of 24 panels of two types (8 inner ring and 16 outer ring). Each mirror panel module is comprised of a custom-manufactured mirror panel and elements of the alignment system, such as edge sensors and actuators. The mirror panels of M2 are highly aspheric and have a sag of several centimeters. They were fabricated via a two-stage process. First, thin glass sheets were pre-shaped to the approximate required figure using the hot glass slumping technique at FLABEG FE GmbH in Germany. Pre-shaped glass sheets were delivered to Media Lario S.r.l. in Italy, where they were assembled into mirror panels via a cold glass slumping process similar to that used for the fabrication of the M1 panels. The coating of the secondary mirror panels was done by ZAOT S.r.l. in Italy and delivered to the U.S. The parts of the mirror panel alignment system were fabricated by Share Machine Inc. in the U.S. They were assembled into Stewart platforms (hexapods), integrated with the mirror panels, augmented with electronics, and calibrated at UCLA. Finally, the complete M2 mirror panel modules were delivered to Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) and installed on the pSCT.
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+The installation of the camera took place from May to June 2018. The prototype camera of the pSCT contains 25 front-end electronics (FEE) modules with 64 photon-detecting sensors (pixels) in each. Sixteen FEE modules were assembled at participating U.S. institutions and nine were delivered by the INAF institutions in Italy. The camera photon sensors are silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) designed and manufactured by Hamamatsu Photonics and Fondazione Bruno Kessler. The pSCT camera mechanical system was designed at and procured by the University of Chicago. The main pSCT camera integration activities took place at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The current prototype SCT camera has a total of 1,600 imaging pixels with an angular size of 0.067°, which is more than the number of pixels in three VERITAS telescopes (each VERITAS telescopes is comprised of 499 pixels with an angular size of 0.18°). The fully instrumented 8° field of view SCT camera will contain 11,328 pixels (in 177 FEE modules of 64 pixels each).
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+The primary mirror (M1) was installed on the telescope from December 2017 to April 2018. It consists of 48 mirror panel modules (MPMs) of two types (16 inner ring, 32 outer ring). Each MPM includes a mirror panel and an associated alignment system consisting of a Stewart platform (hexapod) and edge sensors to allow it to be aligned with its neighbors. Each MPM is equipped with a controller and microcomputer which gathers information from the edge sensors and controls the motion of the MPM's actuators. The primary mirror panels were custom-fabricated by Media Lario S.r.l. in Italy using a cold glass slumping replication technique developed by the company in collaboration with Brera Astronomical Observatory. The coating of the M1 mirror panels was done by Bte Bedampfungstechnik GmbH in Germany, while the parts for the Stewart platforms were machined at Share Machine Inc. in the U.S. Finally, the MPMs were assembled and calibrated at UCLA prior to their delivery to Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) and installation onto the telescope.
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+The optical support structure (OSS) of the pSCT was designed at Argonne National Laboratory and manufactured by Walters Metal Fabrication in the U.S. It was delivered to Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) in early spring 2016. The OSS assembly and its installation on the pSCT tower was done by FLWO personnel from May to August 2016.
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+The telescope tower and positioning system of pSCT was designed by the team at DESY, Zeuthen in Germany. The components were fabricated in Europe, preassembled at DESY, Zeuthen, and shipped to Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO). The positioner tower and telescope motion system was installed at the pSCT foundation by DESY engineers and FLWO personnel from February to April 2016.
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+The pSCT is constructed on the foundation previously used for the VERITAS prototype telescope at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO). To accommodate the 80 ton weight of the pSCT, it was necessary to reinforce the original foundation. This work was conducted from June 2015 to January 2016. During the same period, all infrastructure elements such as conduits, the foundation for the camera chiller, and the electrical distribution shed, were also installed.
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+This video shows the work done by the group at the University of Wisconsin, Madison on the camera for the pSCT. The camera is five feet across and weighs several hundred pounds. It currently features an array of 1600 pixels based on silicon photomultiplier sensors and custom electronics to capture Cherenkov light flashes focused by the dual-mirror pSCT optics. The camera is sensitive to individual photons with nanosecond timing resolution. This video explains the integration and testing of the camera, including the first recording of a light flash by the integrated camera. Video Produced by Craig Wild (University of Wisconsin Communications).
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The Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope Achieves First Light
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Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Amado, AZ January 23, 2019
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+Amado, AZ - Less than a week after its inauguration on 17 January 2019, the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT), a prototype telescope proposed for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), successfully detected its first Cherenkov light on January 23 at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona. A dual-mirrored Medium-Sized Telescope, the SCT is proposed to cover the middle of CTA’s energy range (80 GeV – 50 TeV).
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+The week following the inauguration, the camera was operated for the first time with the mirrors uncovered in a commissioning test run. During the first few minutes of this “first light” run on the evening of January 23, cosmic-ray-induced Cherenkov air shower events were identified in the raw, uncalibrated camera data. Follow the link below to the official CTA announcement to see videos of the data from two events captured during the "first light" run.
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Cherenkov light is the result of a gamma ray or cosmic ray from an astrophysical source interacting with the Earth’s atmosphere. The flash of bluish light only lasts a few billionths of a second and is extremely faint. Gamma-ray telescope cameras are sensitive to these faint flashes. The pSCT camera triggers when several neighboring pixels detect light within a few nanoseconds of one another. The camera has a modular design, with 25 modules each containing 64 pixels. The central module is not yet installed in order to shine a laser beam along the central axis for telescope alignment, and a neighboring module was disabled during the test run. The pixel amplitudes are raw and uncalibrated, but the early results are a major milestone for the SCT team.
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+Text (with minor modifications) from the official CTA Press Release
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Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope Inaugurated at Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory
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Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Amado, AZ January 17-18, 2019
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+Expected to see first light in early 2019, a prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT) for gamma-ray astronomy will be unveiled in a special inauguration event on January 17, 2019 at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) in Amado, Arizona.
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+Exploiting a novel optical design, the 9.7-m aperture pSCT is a pathfinder telescope for use in the next-generation very-high-energy gamma-ray observatory, the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), for which construction will begin in 2019.
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+"The inauguration of the pSCT is an exciting moment for the institutions involved in its development and construction," said CTA-US Consortium Chair David Williams, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "The first of its kind in the history of gamma-ray telescopes, the SCT design is expected to boost CTA performance towards the theoretical limit of the technology."
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+The SCT's complex dual-mirror optical system improves on the single-mirror designs traditionally used in gamma-ray telescopes by dramatically enhancing the optical quality of their focused light over a large region of the sky, and by enabling the use of compact, highly-efficient photo-sensors in the telescope camera.
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+"Ultimately, the SCT is designed to improve CTA's ability to detect very-high-energy gamma-ray sources, which may also be sources of neutrinos and gravitational waves," said Prof. Vladimir Vassiliev, Principal Investigator, pSCT. “Once the SCT technology is demonstrated at FLWO, it is hoped that SCTs will become a part of at least one of the two CTA arrays, located in each of the northern and southern hemispheres."
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+The CTA Observatory (CTAO) will consist of 118 telescopes of three different sizes, and is expected to detect sources of gamma rays in the energy range 20 GeV to 300 TeV with about ten times increased sensitivity compared to any current observatory. Notable for providing improved gamma-ray angular resolution and its very-high-resolution camera (>11,000 pixels), the SCT is proposed for the medium-sized CTA telescopes, and will primarily contribute to the middle (80 GeV – 50 TeV) of CTA's energy range.
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+"The SCT and other telescopes at CTA will greatly improve upon current gamma-ray research being conducted at HAWC, HESS, MAGIC, and VERITAS, the last of which is located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory," said Dr. Wystan Benbow, Director, VERITAS. "Gamma-ray observatories like VERITAS have been operating for 12 to 16 years, and their many successes have brought very-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy into the mainstream, and have made many exciting discoveries. We hope CTA will supersede VERITAS around 2023, and it will be used to continue to build upon the 50 years of gamma-ray research at the Whipple Observatory and elsewhere."
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+Text from Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian press release.
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If you have any questions about the construction of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope or would like to contact
+ a member of the team, please click the button to send us an email.
Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope construction at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Arizona
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+#AuthLDAPGroupAttribute member
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+# Enable this to require membership to the Grads group for access
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Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope construction at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Arizona
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The CTA project is an initiative to build the next generation ground-based very high energy gamma-ray instrument.
+ It will serve as an open observatory to a wide astrophysics community and will provide a deep insight into the non-thermal
+ high-energy universe. This image automatically reloads.
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Have questions?
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If you have any questions about the construction of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope or would like to contact
+ a member of the team, please click the button to send us an email.
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