Laboratory Demonstration of an Active Optics System for High-Resolution Deployable CubeSat

Noah Schwartz, David Pearson, Stephen Todd, Maria Milanova, William Brzozowski, Andy Vick, David Lunney, Donald MacLeod, Steve Greenland, Jean-François Sauvage, Benjamin Gore
(Submitted on 24 Sep 2018)

In this paper we present HighRes: a laboratory demonstration of a 3U CubeSat with a deployable primary mirror that has the potential of achieving high-resolution imaging for Earth Observation. The system is based on a Cassegrain telescope with a segmented primary mirror composed of 4 petals that form an effective aperture of 300 mm. The design provides diffraction limited performance over the entire field-of-view and allows for a panchromatic ground-sampling distance of less than 1 m at an altitude of 350 km. The alignment and co-phasing of the mirror segments is performed by focal plane sharpening and is validated through rigorous numerical simulations. The opto-mechanical design of the prototype and its laboratory demonstration are described and measurements from the on-board metrology sensors are presented. This data verifies that the performance of the mirror deployment and manipulation systems is sufficient for co-phasing. In addition, it is shown that the mirrors can be driven to any target position with an accuracy of 25 nm using closed-loop feedback between the mirror motors and the on-board metrology.

Comments:    15 pages, 19 figures, 4S Symposium, Conference Proceeding, Sorrento, Italy, May 28 – June 1, 2018
Subjects:    Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Optics (physics.optics)
Cite as:    arXiv:1809.09097 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1809.09097v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Noah Schwartz
[v1] Mon, 24 Sep 2018 11:21:06 GMT (1783kb)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.09097