Proposed Design Concepts Of The Fast Focus Cabin Suspension

The National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) plan to build a 500m radio telescope in southern China [1]. The telescope has a fixed but active main reflector, and large sky coverage is achieved by moving the receivers on a focus surface 160m above the main reflector. The paper describes recommended design concepts for the cable system, the drives and the cabin mechanisms, which position and point the receiver platform. The simulation study, which is basis of the presented results, was executed by engineers of the Technical University Darmstadt under a contract of NAOC in cooperation with two visiting engineers of NAOC and lead by the author [2]. The analysis results and end-to-end simulations itself are described in more detail in two other contributions to this conference [3], [4].