ICONN — THE INFRARED COHERENCING NEAREST NEIGHBOR TRACKER

Abstract

ICONN is a dedicated fringe tracker for the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI) that employs a baseline bootstrapping combination scheme utilizing the interferometer's "Y"-shaped telescope array. The ICONN optomechanics are designed in a modular fashion to combine light from two to ten telescopes while tracking on the nearest neighbor baselines. The software tasked with operating ICONN is designed to interface with the larger MROI software supervisory system. Commands are distributed to high level processes within ICONN, which in turn pass them down internally to lower level threads. The design of ICONN is now complete and laboratory testing has commenced. This paper details the optomechanical and software design of ICONN.