Large Binocular Telescope pre-assembly

The Large Binocular Telescope is currently in the pre- assembly phase at the Ansaldo Energia workshop in Milan. Since late 1998 the manufacturing of the Azimuth and Elevation structures has been taken place in North Italy along with the main auxiliary equipments, and since September 1999, the Azimuth Ring have been assembled and aligned on the new concrete foundation poured months before in the same area. The pre-assembly activity in Italy will take some months more from now as the final acceptance tests are scheduled now for December 2000; then the whole telescope steel structure will be disassembled and shipped to Mt. Graham where the final assembling phase will start in spring 2001. In this paper, the authors, part of some industrial companies and public institutes main character in this scientific and technical challenges, briefly describe the manufacturing and the machining processes of the main telescope components, the reached results and the procedures adopted during the pre-assembling as overall test bench for the final erection in Arizona.

[1]  John M. Hill Large Binocular Telescope Project , 1997, Other Conferences.

[2]  John M. Hill,et al.  Nearly completed Large Binocular Telescope facility yields many lessons learned , 2000, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.