Abstract
The University of California and California Institute of Technology are currently studying the feasibility of building a 30-m segmented ground based optical telescope called the California Extremely Large Telescope (CELT). The early ideas for this telescope were first described by Nelson and Mast and more recently refined by Nelson. In parallel, concepts for the fabrication of the primary segments were proposed by Mast, Nelson and Sommargren where high risk technologies were identified. One of these was the surface figure metrology needed for fabricating the aspheric mirror segments. This report addresses the advanced interferometry that will be needed to achieve 15nm rms accuracy for mirror segments with aspheric departures as large as 35mm peak-to-valley. For reasons of cost, size, measurement consistency and ease of operation we believe it is desirable to have a single interferometer that can be universally applied to each and every mirror segment. Such an instrument is described in this report.
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