Abstract
We have studied four multi-pupil telescope architectures giving 6.5-m equivalent collecting diameter in order to find the optimum design for adaptive optics applications. The studied architectures are: a multi-mirror telescope with 4 × 3.25-m independent telescopes mounted on the same yoke (MMMT); a primary mirror composed of seven 2.7-m speherical mirrors with a common secondary (TEMOS), and two Keck type segmented telescopes with 7 and 19 segments (TIM7 and TIM19, respectively). By means of Monte Carlo simulations using IDL (c), we made a statiscal study of the aberration optical tolerances for each telescope architecture. We included the piston and tip-tilt effects of independent individual sub-pupils. The tolerance criteria required diffraction limited telescopes in the visible and near infrared (a minimum Strehl ratio of 0.8) and, as a reference, seeing-limited imaging quality (80% light concentration in 0.25 arcsec). The same simulations were made for a 6.5-m monolithic primary mirror telescope for the purposes of comparison and verification.
