OPTIMIZATION AND EVALUATION OF MANUFACTURING TOLERANCES OF A THREE-MIRROR ASPHERIC CAMERA

Abstract

In an attempt to design a three -mirror aspheric camera, a procedure was developed to arrive at a design with a minimum obscuration ratio. It was found that, in some cases, the sky baffling became the diffracting obscuration rather than the obscuration caused by the secondary. The procedure allowed for this and was able to select a system with the smallest diffracting obscuration in the pupil. Initially, two designs were selected and optimized through the use of aspheric surfaces. The designs represented two extremes in that one had much faster surfaces than the other. The fast mirror system was easier to optimize, performed better, and had the shorter over -all length. Further, evaluation of manufacturing errors on the fast mirror design showed that an acceptable level of performance could be expected if the errors were kept small. The maximum errors are spacing errors ±0.0005 in. tilt of surface errors ±0.001 /D in. radii of curvature errors ±0.125 in. where D is the diameter of the mirror surface.