Aspects of concurrent design during the VISTA IR Camera detailed design phase

Journal article

As detailed instrument design progresses, judgements have to be made as to what changes to allow and when models such as thermal, stray-light and mechanical structure analysis have to be re-run. Starting from a well-founded preliminary design, and using good engineering design when incorporating changes, the design detailing and re-run of the models should bring no surprises. Nevertheless there are issues for maintaining the design and model configuration to a reasonably concurrent level. Using modern modeling software packages and foresight in setting up the models the process is made efficient, but at the same time the level of detail and number of cases now needed for instrument reviews is also large in order to minimise risks. We describe examples from the detailed instrument design of the VISTA IR Camera to illustrate these aspects and outline the design and analysis methods used.

Authors: Caldwell, M; Whalley, M; Woodhouse, G; Edeson, R; Burke, K

• Journal: Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering
• Volume: 5497
• Pages: 51-61
• Publication date: 2004-01-01
• DOI: 10.1117/12.550907
• ISSN: 0277-786X
• Language: English
• Keywords: VISTA; Instrumentation; Wide-field; Infrared camera