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