The design for off-axis multimirror optical system with large field and small F number using coaxial assembly of two mirrors

Abstract

The reflection optical system gets more and more attention nowadays owing to without chromatic aberration and small volume. The manufacturing and assembly/calibration technology for the coaxial reflection optical system is more mature relative to the other reflection optical systems. But the coaxial reflection optical system will obstruct the incidence ray especially when the field is large, which will reduce the energy entering the optical system and reduce the resolution. The off-axis Three-Mirror Optical Systems can conquer those disadvantages of the coaxial reflection optical system, however the manufacturing and assembly/calibration for the off-axis Optical Systems is very difficult which must use computer-aided technology. The manufacturing and assembly/calibration technology is the main bottleneck for the off-axis Optical Systems to the engineering application. The Author of this thesis researched the design theory of the Three-Mirror Optical System, and then schemed out off-axis Three-Mirror and Multi-Mirror Optical System smartly using coaxial two-mirror optical structure which conquers the disadvantage of small field and possesses of the all advantages of the coaxial reflection optical system. This new optical system has two mirrors, one of which is a parabolic mirror with high-order aspheric term and the other is a hyperboloid mirror with high-order aspheric term. The characteristics of this new optical system are as follows: the F Number is 1.25, the field of view is 2°×2° and the total length is only 115mm with coaxial assembly of the two mirrors.