Design and Construction of easily aligned Compact Three Mirror Anastigmat Telescope for Earth observation
Presented by:
Craig Ingram
Craig ingram
CSIRO
Arpit Saxena
CSIRO
Joshua Pease
CSIRO
Roshan Dodanwela
CSIRO
Martin O'Connor
University of Adelaide
Stephen Gensemer
CSIRO
CSIRO
This paper gives an overview of the design and construction of a three-mirror anastigmatic Telescope Assembly for the Cyanosat payload. The Cyanosat Program aims to develop hyperspectral sensors for Earth Observation providing a platform specifically designed to recognise harmful algal blooms from space for Australian water quality scientists. An off-axis three mirror anastigmatic telescope was chosen due to its wide field of view and large light gathering capability. Although these systems have remarkably high performance and can be designed to minimize all three main optical aberrations current TMA designs [1,2] are extremely sensitive to alignment. To help alleviate this issue a novel opto-mechanical design was developed in conjunction with the optical design to help simplify the alignment process. Thanks to its all-mirrors design, the system is intrinsically achromatic and can be expanded to use at longer wavelengths to aid in expanding the wavelength range of the Cyanosat imager in the future. This paper describes the procedure followed and the results obtained for the alignment of the optics of this instrument. 1. Cook, L. G., U.S. Patent No. 4,265,510. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. (1981). 2. Korsch, D., “Design and optimization technique for three-mirror telescopes,” Applied optics, 19(21), 3640-3645. (1980)
Category:
Remote sensing & Earth observations