Research progress of large optics in the TMT MOBIE

The multi-object broadband imaging echellette (MOBIE) is the seeing-limited, visible-wavelength imaging multi-object spectrograph (MOS) planned for first-light use on the thirty meter telescope (TMT). The current MOBIE optical design provides two color channels, spanning the 310nm-550nm and 550nm-1000nm passbands. The involved large optics includes an atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) prism (1.4m in diameter), a collimator (1.7mx1.0m), a dichroic(680 mm x500 mm x 30 mm), a red folding mirror and two corrector lenses(570mm in diameter) for different channels. In the past two years, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) has been included in the preliminary study of folding mirror sub-system in MOBIE, especially the study on the large optics manufacture techniques. The research progress of these large optics will be reviewed in this paper. The influence of optical quality of the large optics on the MOBIE is analyzed in order to define the specifications of the large optics. The manufacture methods are designed for different large optics. In order to testify the effectiveness of the manufacture methods, some samples have been processed and the final performance including wavefront error and spectral properties are tested. Finally, the future work including remaining problems and possible solutions are introduced.