The use of deployable fibre-bundles plays an increasing role in the design of future Multi-Object-Spectrographs (MOS). Within a research and development project for "Enabling Technologies for the E-ELT", various miniaturized, fibrebundles were designed, built and tested for their suitability for a proposed ELT-MOS instrument. The paper describes the opto-mechanical designs of the bundles and the different manufacture approaches, using glued, stacked and fused optical fibre bundles. The fibre bundles are characterized for performance, using dedicated testbenches in the laboratory and at a telescope simulator. Their performance is measured with respect to geometric accuracy, throughput, FRD behavior and cross-talk between channels.

Date Published: 28 July 2014
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9151, Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation, 915151 (28 July 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2056482

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9151:
Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation
Ramón Navarro; Colin R. Cunningham; Allison A. Barto, Editor(s)