Optical design and fabrication of an all-aluminum unobscured two-mirror freeform imaging telescope

Abstract

Freeform optics offers more degrees of freedom to optical design that can benefit from a compact package size and a large field of view for imaging systems. Motivated by the advances in modern optical fabrication and metrology, freeform optics has been found in many applications. In this paper, we will describe the challenging optical design, fabrication, metrology, and assembly of an all-aluminum unobscured two-mirror freeform imaging telescope. The telescope has a large field of view of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"> <mml:mn>20</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> <mml:mo>∘</mml:mo> </mml:msup> <mml:mo>×</mml:mo> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"> <mml:mn>15</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> <mml:mo>∘</mml:mo> </mml:msup> </mml:math> . The freeform aluminum mirrors are manufactured by diamond turning based on a feedback modification strategy. The freeform mirrors are measured by a computer-generated hologram-based interferometric null test method. All-aluminum configuration has the advantages of being athermal and cost-effective.