Design and Implementation of a High Precision Stewart Platform for a Space Camera

In order to design and implement a high-precision Stewart platform to precisely adjust the position and posture of the secondary mirror of a space camera, the following measures were taken: firstly, the inverse mathematical model and ADAMS parametric model of the Stewart platform are established, which are the basis of structural optimization design; secondly, the structural parameters of Stewart platform are obtained through structure optimization design in ADAMS after determining the objective function; thirdly, a 50nm resolution driving strut based on brushless DC motor, ball screw, grating ruler and PI closed-loop control law is designed, which strongly guaranteed the six degrees’ resolution of the Stewart platform that mainly consist of 6 such high-resolution driving struts; finally, the accuracy of Stewart platform is tested via dual frequency laser interferometer and photoelectric autocollimator, and the test results show that the displacement resolution of the Stewart platform is 0.2 μ m, and the angular resolution is 1”, which meets the requirements of the index. The Stewart platform has been successfully applied to the space camera by tuning the secondary mirror precisely in 6 degrees of freedom in the optical alignment experiment, which lays a solid theoretical and practical foundation for on orbit application in future.

CanariCam Mid-infrared Drift Scanning: Improved Sensitivity and Spatial Resolution

Ground-based mid-infrared (MIR) astronomical observations require the removal of the fast time variable components of (a) sky/background variation and (b) array background. Typically, this has been achieved through oscillating the telescope’s secondary mirror a few times a second, a process termed “chopping.” However, chopping reduces on-object photon collection time, imposes stringent demands on the secondary mirror, requires nodding of the telescope to remove the radiative offset imprinted by the chopping, and relies on an often-fixed chop-frequency regardless of the sky conditions in the actual observations. In the 30 m telescope era, secondary mirror chopping is impracticable. However, if the sky and background are sufficiently stable, drift scanning holds the promise to remove the necessity of chopping. In this paper, we report our encouraging drift scanning results using the CanariCam MIR instrument on the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias and the implications to future instruments and experiments.

Wide-Field Telescope Alignment Using the Model-Based Method Combined with the Stochastic Parallel Gradient Descent Algorithm

To acquire images with higher accuracy of wide-field telescopes, deformable mirrors with more than 100 actuators are used, making the telescope alignment more complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, the position of the obscuration caused by the secondary mirror in the experiment system is changed with the difference of fields of view, making the response matrix of the deformable mirror different in various fields of view. To solve this problem, transfer functions corresponding to different fields of view are calculated according to the wavefront edge check and boundary conditions. In this paper, a model-based method combined with the stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) algorithm is used. The experiment results show that our method can correct the aberrations with a high accuracy in both on-axis and off-axis fields, indicating that the effective actuators are well chosen corresponding to different fields of view.

Two-mirror cylindrical antenna system with high efficiency.

A technique for the synthesis of two-mirror cylindrical antenna systems for a given amplitude distribution in the aperture has been developed. At the first stage geometrical-optical synthesis is carried out, at the second stage a refined solution is found using the field of the feed on the secondary mirror found by the numerical method of finite element. As an example, a two-mirror cylindrical antenna system with a horn-lens feed and a uniform field distribution in the main mirror aperture has been synthesized. Using full-wave simulation by the finite element method, the analysis of the radiation characteristics of a synthesized two-mirror antenna system is carried out. The scanning characteristics of the antenna system by turning the main mirror are investigated. The efficiency of a cylindrical two-mirror antenna system with a horn-lens waveguide transition in the E-plane and an H- sectorial horn feed reaches 0.95 i.e. is close to the limiting value. When scanning the main lobe of the pattern in an angular sector of 27 degrees due to the rotation of the main mirror gain exceeds 26 dB, and efficiency exceeds 0.8.