The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) recently (2008) abandoned attempts at using capacitive mirror edge sensors, mainly due to poor performance at a relative humidity above ~60%, a not infrequent occurrence. Different technologies are now being explored for alternative sensors on SALT. In this paper we describe the design and development of a novel prototype optical edge sensor, based on the application of the interferential scanning principle, as used in optical encoders. These

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... sensors were subsequently tested at SAAO and ESO, for potential application on SALT and E-ELT. Environmental tests, conducted in climatic control chambers, looked at temperature and relative humidity sensitivity, long term stability and sensor noise. The temperature sensitivity for height and gap were, respectively, 10nm/°C and 44nm/°C, while for relative humidity they were 4nm/10% and 50nm/10%, respectively. These either met, or were close to, the SALT specification. While there were significant lags in response, this was due to the sensor's relatively large mass (~200 gm per sensor half), which was not optimized. This is likely to improve, should a revised design be developed in future. Impressively the sensor noise was <0.015 nm RMS, over three orders of magnitude better than the specification. Our conclusions are that optical edge sensing is a viable technique for use on segmented mirror telescopes.