Baffles design of the PROBA-V wide FOV TMA

Proba-V payload is a successor of the Vegetation instrument, a multispectral imager flown on Spot-4 and subsequently on Spot-5, French satellites for Earth Observation and defence. The instrument, with its wide field of view, is capable of covering a swath of 2200 km, which, in combination with a polar low Earth orbit, guarantees a daily revisit. The lifetime of Spot-5 expires in early 2013, and to ensure the continuity of vegetation data, BELSPO, the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office, supported the development of an instrument that could be flown on a Proba type satellite, a small satellite developed by the Belgian QinetiQ Space (previously known as Verhaert Space). The challenge of this development is to produce an instrument responding to the same user requirements as Vegetation, but with an overall mass of about 30 kg, while the Vegetation instrument mass is 130 kg. This development had become feasible thanks to a number of new technologies that have been developed since the nineties, when Vegetation was first conceived, namely Single Point Diamond Turning fabrication of aspherical mirrors and efficient VNIR and SWIR detectors. The Proba-V payload is based on three identical reflective telescopes using highly aspherical mirrors in a TMA (Three Mirrors Anastigmat) configuration. Each telescope covers a field of view of 34o to reach the required swath. One of the challenges in the development of the PROBA-V instrument is the efficient reduction of stray light. Due to the mass and volume constraints it was not possible to implement a design with an intermediate focus to reduce the stray light. The analysis and minimization of the in-field stray light is an important element of the design because of the large FOV and the surface roughness currently achievable with the Single Point Diamond Turning. This document presents the preliminary baffle layout designed for the Three Mirrors Anastigmatic (TMA) telescope developed for the Proba-V mission. This baffling is used to avoid 1st order stray light i.e. direct stray light or through reflections on the mirrors. The stray light from the SWIR folding mirror is also studied. After these preliminary analyses the mechanical structure of the TMA is designed then verified in term of vignetting and stray light

Experimental validation of opto-thermo-elastic modeling in OOFELIE Multiphysics

The objective of this work is to demonstrate the correlation between a simple laboratory test bench case and the predictions of the Oofelie MultiPhysics software in order to deduce modelling guidelines and improvements. For that purpose two optical systems have been analysed. The first one is a spherical lens fixed in an aluminium barrel, which is the simplest structure found in an optomechanical system. In this study, material characteristics are assumed to be well known: BK7 and aluminium have been retained. Temperature variations between 0 and +60°C from ambient have been applied to the samples. The second system is a YAG laser bar heated by means of a dedicated oven. For the two test benches thermo-elastic distortions have been measured using a Fizeau interferometer. This sensor measures wavefront error in the range of 20 nm to 1 μm without physical contact with the optomechanical system. For the YAG bar birefringence and polarization measurements have also been performed using a polarimetric bench. The tests results have been compared to the predictions obtained by Oofelie MultiPhysics which is a multiphysics toolkit treating coupled problems of optics, mechanics, thermal physics, electricity, electromagnetism, acoustics and hydrodynamics. From this comparison modelling guidelines have been issued with the aim of improving the accuracy of computed thermo-elastic distortions and their impact on the optical performances

Asgard/NOTT: L-band nulling interferometry at the VLTI I. Simulating the expected high-contrast performance

Context: NOTT (formerly Hi-5) is a new high-contrast L' band (3.5-4.0 \textmu m) beam combiner for the VLTI with the ambitious goal to be sensitive to young giant exoplanets down to 5 mas separation around nearby stars. The performance of nulling interferometers in these wavelengths is affected both by fundamental noise from the background and by the contributions of instrumental noises. This motivates the development of end-to-end simulations to optimize these instruments. Aims: To enable the performance evaluation and inform the design of such instruments on the current and future infrastructures, taking into account the different sources of noise, and their correlation. Methods: SCIFYsim is an end-to-end simulator for single mode filtered beam combiners, with an emphasis on nulling interferometers. It is used to compute a covariance matrix of the errors. Statistical detection tests based on likelihood ratios are then used to compute compound detection limits for the instrument. Results: With the current assumptions on the performance of the wavefront correction systems, the errors are dominated by correlated instrumental errors down to stars of magnitude 6-7 in the L band, beyond which thermal background from the telescopes and relay system becomes dominant. Conclusions: SCIFYsim is suited to anticipate some of the challenges of design, tuning, operation and signal processing for integrated optics beam combiners. The detection limits found for this early version of NOTT simulation with the unit telescopes are compatible with detections at contrasts up to $10^5$ in the L band at separations of 5 to 80 mas around bright stars

Technical requirements and optical design of the Hi-5 spectrometer

Hi-5 is a proposed L’ band high-contrast nulling interferometric instrument for the visitor focus of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). As a part of the ERC consolidator project called SCIFY (Self-Calibrated Interferometry For exoplanet spectroscopY), the instrument aims to achieve sufficient dynamic range and angular resolution to directly image and characterize the snow line of young extra-solar planetary systems. The spectrometer is based on a dispersive grism and is located downstream of an integrated optics beam- combiner. To reach the contrast and sensitivity specifications, the outputs of the I/O chip must be sufficiently separated and properly sampled on the Hawaii-2RG detector. This has many implications for the photonic chip and spectrometer design. We present these technical requirements, trade-off studies, and phase-A of the optical design of the Hi-5 spectrometer in this paper. For both science and contract-driven reasons, the instrument design currently features three different spectroscopic modes (R=20, 400, and 2000). Designs and efficiency estimates for the grisms are also presented as well as the strategy to separate the two polarization states.SCIF

A Target Projector for Videogrammetry under Vacuum Conditions

Videogrammetry is a 3-dimensional co-ordinate measuring technique that (now) uses digital image capture as the recording method. Images are taken from at least two different locations and the light-rays from the camera to the measurement object are intersected by triangulation into 3D point coordinates. With a large number of images, the camera orientation and 3D point locations are accurately determined with the use of a full mathematical model (bundle adjustment). Adhesive targets are commonly used for point materialization. Those targets consist of a retro-reflective material, with an adhesive backing for sticking to the structure under investigation. A drawback of these types of targets is that they can lose their adhesion and shape during thermal vacuum cycling, especially when cryogenic temperatures are involved. In addition the operation of placing and removing targets is a critical procedure that can lead to undesirable contamination and damage to the test item. Because they require to be physically attached to the surface to be measured, this can also compromise the quality assurance of the test object. Such problems were encountered during cryogenic thermal vacuum qualification testing of the ESA Planck Surveyor mission telescope reflectors. In the development described here the aim was to replace the use of adhesive targets by projected dots. The idea is not fundamentally new. Indeed a US company, Geodetic Systems Inc. (GSI) proposes already a commercial target projector for videogrammetry which uses a flashlamp and is adequate for workshop and laboratory applications. Dot projection videogrammetry is also suggested as a shape measurement method of Gossamer structures, membrane reflectors, etc…Note that there are fundamental differences in use and applications of retro-reflective targets and dot projection: • Retro-reflective targets are materialized on the test article. They appear as fiducials attached to the test article. Any relative distortion of the materialized point can be tracked with respect to the test article itself. • Projected dots are not materialized on the object. Practically a specific point cannot be tracked by this method. The dense cloud of projected dots allows sampling the surface or the shape in an arbitrary way.The Target Projector System (TPS), described here (Fig.1), was designed and manufactured to operate in the Large Space Simulator (LSS) of ESAof ESA under thermal vacuum conditions and to have a minimized temperature exchange with its environment. It is operational over a temperature range of 90K to 350 K, and has a wavelength of 808 nm.Qualification tests and results under vacuum, along with an assessment of the videogrammetric accuracy achievable for various configurations of this unique device are presented

Study of a solar concentrator for space based on a diffractive/refractive optical combination

This paper presents a new design of a planar solar concentrator at 10× with spectral splitting focusing on two separated PV cells, allowing independent control. Optical elements, blazed diffraction grating and Fresnel lens, are optimized