“Design and building of a high speed Schmidt-Cassegrain objective for space qualified remote sensing camera”

Abstract

Remote sensing satellites require very accurate pointing to specific locations of interest with high resolution and small latency. Therefore, the space imaging systems attempted to achieve the possible highest ground resolution with minimum cost as possible. In this paper, design process of an electro-optical imaging payload is described considering the limited weight and small volume in addition to minimum power consumptions. The most promising prospects for high resolution imaging are connected with passive optical sub-systems, especially push broom one. For design a multiband Space remote sensing payload with 4°7′ field of view that operates in multi spectral bands and a panchromatic band, it requires the high speed Schmidt–cassegrain objective. The most promising prospects for high resolution imaging are connected with passive optical sub-systems, especially push broom one. The Schmidt-Cassegrain objective is a catadioptric objective that combines a Cassegrain reflector’s optical path with a Schmidt corrector plate to make a compact objective that uses simple spherical surfaces only. Because of the limited weight of the camera (22.2 kg), the multispectral consists of only one single optical system large F-Number (F5) and provided with spectrum splitter.In addition, the key points in design of such types of cameras were listed as well as clarifying the optical design of such objective.

Keywords

• Schmidt-cassegrain
• Multispectral
• Catadioptric
• Panchromatic
• Spacecraft