DESIGN HISTORY AND SPECIFICATIONS FOR THE MARINER '69 HIGH-RESOLUTION TELESCOPE

Abstract

This report presents the author's basic findings on various optical systems that he studied and /or designed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, for the high -resolution telescope of NASA's Mariner '69 and '71 television experiments. This f/2.5 508-mm-efl system had a 2° full field. Application of Burch's plate diagram was found useful in describing the research. Design work was done using the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory lens design program, which meant using an rms spot size radius as the design criterion. The JPL requirement was a 40% modulation transfer factor at 80 Qp /mm, taking into account diffraction effects. Particular emphasis is placed on presenting computed and actual performance of the "long" one-conic "Equi -Radii Baker" telescope, which was chosen to fly by Mars in the Mariner VI and VII spacecraft. This system had the best resolution and lightest weight of any system optimized by the author but was also the longest system. It consisted of an aspheric plate for the window plus two mirrors of equal radius, the primary being an oblate spheroid and the secondary a sphere. The aspheric plate had to have the proper sphericity to introduce enough axial color to balance the large amount of spherochromatism occurring over the required spectral bandwidth.