Matisse is a four channel mid-infrared spectro-interferometric instrument for ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). A battery of 8 cryogenic shutters selects the active telescopes at the entrance of the cold optics subsystem. For thermal stability of the system, the shutter uses a minimum amount of power for switching. On top of that the shutter must block incoming beams within 30 milliseconds for detector remanence calibration. A fast shutter was designed, meeting these requirements at both ambient temperature and in a 38 K vacuum cryogenic environment. This paper describes the design of this fast shutter and discusses the test results.

Date Published: 13 September 2012
PDF: 16 pages
Proc. SPIE 8450, Modern Technologies in Space- and Ground-based Telescopes and Instrumentation II, 84504F (13 September 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.926226

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8450:
Modern Technologies in Space- and Ground-based Telescopes and Instrumentation II
Ramón Navarro; Colin R. Cunningham; Eric Prieto, Editor(s)