Active Alignment of Large-Aperture Space Telescopes for Optimal Ellipticity Performance

Abstract

Ellipticity performance of space telescopes is important for exploration of dark matter. However, traditional on-orbit active optical alignment of space telescopes often takes “minimum wavefront error across the field of view” as the correction goal, and the ellipticity performance after correcting the wave aberration is not optimal. This paper proposes an active optical alignment strategy to achieve optimal ellipticity performance. Based on the framework of nodal aberration theory (NAT), the aberration field distribution corresponding to the optimal full field-of-view ellipticity is determined using global optimization. The degrees of freedom (DOFs) of the secondary mirror and the folded flat mirror are taken as the compensation DOFs to achieve the optimal ellipticity performance. Some valuable insights into aberration field characteristics corresponding to optimal ellipticity performance are presented. This work lays a basis for the correction of ellipticity for complicated optical systems.

Keywords

• active optical alignment
• ellipticity performance
• space telescope