MOIRE: ground demonstration of a large aperture diffractive transmissive telescope

作者：Paul D. Atcheson, Jeanette L. Domber, Kevin Whiteaker, Jerald A. Britten, S. N. Dixit, Brandon Farmer · 发表于：Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 年份：2014 · DOI：10.1117/12.2054104 · 被引用次数：74 · 研究领域：Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing、Optical measurement and interference techniques、Optical Coatings and Gratings

The desire to field space-based telescopes with apertures in excess of 10 meter diameter is forcing the development of extreme lightweighted large optomechanical structures. Sparse apertures, shell optics, and membrane optics are a few of the approaches that have been investigated and demonstrated. Membrane optics in particular have been investigated for many years. The MOIRE approach in which the membrane is used as a transmissive diffractive optical element (DOE) offers a significant relaxation in the control requirements on the membrane surface figure, supports extreme lightweighting of the primary collecting optic, and provides a path for rapid low cost production of the primary optical elements. Successful development of a powered meter-scale transmissive membrane DOE was reported in 2012. This paper presents initial imaging results from integrating meter-scale transmissive DOEs into the primary element of a 5- meter diameter telescope architecture. The brassboard telescope successfully demonstrates the ability to collect polychromatic high resolution imagery over a representative object using the transmissive DOE technology. The telescope includes multiple segments of a 5-meter diameter telescope primary with an overall length of 27 meters. The object scene used for the demonstration represents a 1.5 km square complex ground scene. Imaging is accomplished in a standard laboratory environment using a 40 nm spectral bandwidth centered on 650 nm. Theoretical imaging qualit...