Meter-Scale Optical Systems

Abstract

This dissertation explores optical systems with meter-scale mirrors intended for large laser beam projection for high speed space travel, solar energy generation, and radio astronomy. The size of these optics pose unique challenges for fabrication, alignment, and metrology. Additionally, these systems would use thousands of modules which limit the unit cost of the optics. Considering these challenges, this dissertation discusses the design, manufacturing, mounting, alignment, and metrology of these mirrors and their optical systems. Specifically it includes a system design for a laser beam projector using a super array of laser blocks and mirrors with discussions on the theory of aligning thousands of mirrors across kilometers of aperture. It also discusses two solar energy concentrators, one that splits the solar spectrum with a large dichroic mirror and another that uses a fly’s eye lens array to divide sunlight onto small, high efficiency photovoltaic cells. Included are details of the innovative manufacturing process of the 0.3 m curved lenslet array. Finally a new method is demonstrated for forming large aluminum reflectors for radio telescopes.