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T.K. Sridharan, M. Saito, N. A. Patel (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), SMA Team
The surface smoothness of the Submillimeter Array (SMA) antennas has been measured by near-field holography at 232.4GHz with the standard SMA optics and receivers. A low-power phase-locked signal generator mounted on the Subaru Telescope building is used as the illuminating source for the central portion of the array. So far we have used these measurements to set the surfaces of five of the antennas to ~ 20 micron rms. One antenna surface has been set to 13 micron rms and monitored over several months. The short term repeatability of the measurements is 8 micron rms over time scales of several weeks and 11 micron rms for the long-term (6 months). During this time the antnenna was moved from one pad to another. The results show that the surface remains stable and will not be affected by array reconfigurations.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: tksridha@cfa.harvard.edu