Optical Design of a Miniaturized Airborne Push-Broom Spectrometer

Abstract

Combining the requirements of spectrometers for unmanned aerial vehicle platforms, a miniaturized airborne wide-angle push-broom imaging spectrometer with an Offner configuration is designed. The system comprises an objective lens and an Offner-type spectrometer with a spectral range of 400~1000 nm and a spectral resolution of 15 nm. The objective lens and Offner spectrometer are designed in isolation before integration. The front objective lens is an inverted telephoto with a focal length of 13 mm, a relative aperture of 1/4.5, and a field of view of 54°. The frequency of the convex grating in the Offner configuration is 102 LP/mm, and the dispersion width is 2.6 mm. The modulation transfer function of the integrated system is greater than 0.4 at the Nyquist frequency in all spectral bands. To estimate the volume and weight of the system, a preliminary optical–mechanical design scheme is given in this paper. The entire spectrometer has a volume of 130 × 80 × 120 mm and is less than 3 kg, which realizes the miniaturization design of the imaging spectrometer with a wide field of view for unmanned aerial vehicle platforms.

Keywords

• spectrometer
• UAV
• optical design
• SNR
• Offner
• miniaturization