Wavefront alignment research of segmented mirror synthetic aperture optical (SAO) system

Abstract

Wavefront control technology and imaging experiment are introduced for a segmented mirror SAO system with deformable sub-mirrors. This system is a RC style with 300mm aperture, 4.5 F#, ±0.4°FOV, 0.45~0.75μm wave band, and diffraction-limit design MTF. The primary mirror is composed by three sub-mirrors, with parabolic shape, and each deformable sub-mirror has 19 actuators to control and keep the surface shape, and 5 actuators to align sub-mirrors location in 5 degree of freedom. Interferometer is used to feed back and control exit wavefront error, and base on measurement and finite element analysis, location and quanitity of actuators are optimized, making the surface shape and misadjustment errors interact and compensate each other, and the synthetic system exit pupil wavefront error is controlled. The integrated exit pupil wavefront errors are gotten by ZYGO interferometer, and central FOV is 0.077λRMS, and edge FOV is 0.093λRMS. At the end, an imaging experiment is executed, and good results are obtained, which proves, the deformable sub-mirrors have the ability to meliorate alignment and the latter can retroact the former, and this relationship iterate make system exit pupil wavefront error convergence and improve segmented mirror SAO system imaging ability.