Radio Telescope Reflector Adjustment

Since the middle of the last century, the advent of radio telescopes has brought a whole new way and approach to astronomical observation. For Arecibo-type radio telescopes, the tuning optimization of the active reflecting surface (working paraboloid) is the main factor affecting the reflectance calibration. In this paper, based on the spatial coordinate rotation transformation, we innovatively propose an optimization model of the reflective surface segmented paraboloid. We construct the ideal paraboloid equation and fit the working paraboloid based on constraints such as the orientation of the target star, the adjustment limit of the actuator, and the spatial coordinates. We adopt a coarse and fine grid to traverse the feasible solution and record the best adjustment scheme of the main cable nodes at different angles and the corresponding 2226 actuator coordinates and telescoping length, based on which we build a back propagation model to continuously modify the adjustment scheme. A combination of geometric simulation and Monte Carlo tests was also used for verification. Based on this, we further explored the effect of variation between adjacent nodes in the modulating actuator and the possible longitudinal and radial variations. Compared to the conventional conditioning model, the segmented solution idealized paraboloid we created increases the original reflection efficiency from 77.92% to 93.36% in the working area of 300m aperture.