Membrane Space Telescope: Active Surface Control with Radiative Adaptive Optics

Fuente: arXiv
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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rabien, S., Busoni, L., Del Vecchio, C., Ziegleder, J., Esposito, S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Rabien, S.
Busoni, L.
Del Vecchio, C.
Ziegleder, J.
Esposito, S.
author_facet Rabien, S.
Busoni, L.
Del Vecchio, C.
Ziegleder, J.
Esposito, S.
contents Sensitivity and resolution of space telescopes are directly related to the size of the primary mirror. Enabling such future extremely large space telescopes or even arrays of those will require to drastically reduce the areal weight of the mirror system. Utilizing a thin parabolic polymeric membrane as primary mirror offers the prospect of very low weight and the flexible nature of those membranes allows compactly store them upon launch. Upon deployment the structure is unfolded and the mirror shape restored. Being an extremely thin structure, an active shape correction is required. Utilizing a thermal control of the surface via radiative coupling, localized shape changes are imprinted into the membrane telescope. In this paper we present the modelling and experimental test of the radiative adaptive optics. A detailed modeling of the influence function of the radiative shaping onto the membrane mirror has been carried out. Experimentally we have been radiatively actuated the shape of a prototype mirror in closed loop with a wavefront sensor and proven that we can control the mirrors surface figure to a ~15nm RMS precision.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07741
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Membrane Space Telescope: Active Surface Control with Radiative Adaptive Optics
Rabien, S.
Busoni, L.
Del Vecchio, C.
Ziegleder, J.
Esposito, S.
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Sensitivity and resolution of space telescopes are directly related to the size of the primary mirror. Enabling such future extremely large space telescopes or even arrays of those will require to drastically reduce the areal weight of the mirror system. Utilizing a thin parabolic polymeric membrane as primary mirror offers the prospect of very low weight and the flexible nature of those membranes allows compactly store them upon launch. Upon deployment the structure is unfolded and the mirror shape restored. Being an extremely thin structure, an active shape correction is required. Utilizing a thermal control of the surface via radiative coupling, localized shape changes are imprinted into the membrane telescope. In this paper we present the modelling and experimental test of the radiative adaptive optics. A detailed modeling of the influence function of the radiative shaping onto the membrane mirror has been carried out. Experimentally we have been radiatively actuated the shape of a prototype mirror in closed loop with a wavefront sensor and proven that we can control the mirrors surface figure to a ~15nm RMS precision.
title Membrane Space Telescope: Active Surface Control with Radiative Adaptive Optics
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07741