Advancements in Integrated Structural/Thermal/Optical (STOP) Analysis of Optical Systems

摘要

Applications involving optical systems with a variety of transient loading conditions in conjunction with tight optical error budgets require new tools to assess system performance accurately and quickly. For example, an optical telescope in geostationary orbit (e.g.: laser communications or weather satellite) may be required to maintain excellent optical performance with sun intermittently crossing near, or even within the telescope's field of view To optimize the design, the designer would wish to analyze a large number of time steps through the orbit without sacrificing accuracy of the results. Historically, shortcuts have been taken to make the analysis effort manageable: contributing errors are combined in a root-sum-squared fashion; nonlinear optical sensitivities to optical motions are made linear; and the surface deformation of non-circular optics and/or footprints are fit with zernike polynomials. L-3 SSG-Tinsley presents a method that eliminates these enors while allowing very fast processing of many cases. The method uses a software application that interfaces with both structural and optical analysis codes, and achieves raytrace-generated results from the optical model This technique is shown to provide more accurate results than previous methods, as well as provide critical insights into the performance of the system that may be exploited in the design process. Results from the Advanced Baseline Imager ABI telescope are presented as an example.