Opto-mechanical analysis of mirror mounting mechanism

Abstract

This paper is investigated to construct the self-developed fundamental capability which can apply to the opto-mechanical design and analysis in space telescope. The mounting mechanics is found to be a key issue to dramatically affect the optical performance in optical systems. Design and experiments are conducted to study the relationship between stresses and wavefront errors of the opto-mechanical systems by use of the interferometric measurement. Zernike polynomials and wavefront fitting is performed to study the mirror mounting mechanism. It is reported that mirror mounting stresses will severely affect the wavefront errors of the optical systems. Moreover, this investigation indicates that the external stresses will increase the wavefront errors, especially in the terms of astigmatism and trefoil. In addition, the transverse shear stress is more sensitive to degrade the optical performance in this opto-mechanical system design.