Development Plan for the First GMT ASM Reference Body

GMT secondary mirror system consists of 7 segmented adaptive mirrors. Each segment consists of a thin shell mirror, actuators and a reference body. The thin shell has a few millimeters of thickness so that it can be easily bent by push and pull force of actuators to compensate the wavefront disturbance of light due to air turbulence. The one end of actuator is supported by the reference body and the other end is adapted to this thin shell. One of critical role of the reference body is to provide the reference surface for the thin shell actuators. Therefore, the reference body is one of key components to succeed in development of GMT ASM. Recently, Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) and University of Arizona (UA) has signed a contract that they will cooperate to develop the first set of off-axis reference body for GMT ASM. This project started August 2021 and will be finished in Dec. 2022. The reference body has total 675 holes to accommodate actuators and 144 pockets for lightweighting. The rear surface has a curved rib shape with radius of curvature of 4387 mm with offset of 128.32mm. Since this reference body is placed just above the thin shell so that the front surface shape needs to be close to that of thin shell. The front surface has a concave off-axis asphere, of which radius of curvature is 4165.99 mm and off-axis distance is about 1088 mm. The material is Zerodur CTE class 1 (CTE=0.05 ppm/oC) from SCHOTT. All the actuator holes and pockets are machined normal to the front surface. It is a very complex challenging optical elements that involves sophisticated machining process as well as accurate metrology. After finishing the fabrication of reference body in KRISS, it will be shipped to UA for final touches and finally sent to Adoptica in Italy, in early 2023. This paper presets the development plan for the GMT ASM Reference Body and relevant fabrication and metrology plans.