Precision absolute measurement and alignment of laser beam direction and position

For the construction of high-precision optical assemblies, direction and position measurement and control of the involved laser beams are essential. While optical components such as beamsplitters and mirrors can be positioned and oriented accurately using coordinate measuring machines (CMMs), the position and direction control of laser beams is a much more intriguing task since the beams cannot be physically contacted. We present an easy-to-implement method to both align and measure the direction and position of a laser beam using a CMM in conjunction with a position-sensitive quadrant photodiode. By comparing our results to calibrated angular and positional measurements we can conclude that with the proposed method, a laser beam can be both measured and aligned to the desired direction and position with 10 μrad angular and 3 μm positional accuracy

Computing the set of Epsilon-efficient solutions in multiobjective space mission design

In this work, we consider multiobjective space mission design problems. We will start from the need, from a practical point of view, to consider in addition to the (Pareto) optimal solutions also nearly optimal ones. In fact, extending the set of solutions for a given mission to those nearly optimal significantly increases the number of options for the decision maker and gives a measure of the size of the launch windows corresponding to each optimal solution, i.e., a measure of its robustness. Whereas the possible loss of such approximate solutions compared to optimal—and possibly even ‘better’—ones is dispensable. For this, we will examine several typical problems in space trajectory design—a biimpulsive transfer from the Earth to the asteroid Apophis and two low-thrust multigravity assist transfers—and demonstrate the possible benefit of the novel approach. Further, we will present a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm which is designed for this purpose

Laser beam steering for GRACE Follow-On intersatellite interferometry

The GRACE Follow-On satellites will use, for the first time, a Laser Ranging Interferometer to measure intersatellite distance changes from which fluctuations in Earth’s geoid can be inferred. We have investigated the beam steering method that is required to maintain the laser link between the satellites. Although developed for the specific needs of the GRACE Follow-On mission, the beam steering method could also be applied to other intersatellite laser ranging applications where major difficulties are common: large spacecraft separation and large spacecraft attitude jitter. The beam steering method simultaneously coaligns local oscillator beam and transmitted beam with the laser beam received from the distant spacecraft using Differential Wavefront Sensing. We demonstrate the operation of the beam steering method on breadboard level using GRACE satellite attitude jitter data to command a hexapod, a six-degree-of-freedom rotation and translation stage. We verify coalignment of local oscillator beam/ transmitted beam and received beam of better than 10 μrad with a stability of 10 μrad/ Hz−−−√ in the GRACE Follow-On measurement band of 0.002...0.1 Hz. Additionally, important characteristics of the beam steering setup such as Differential Wavefront Sensing signals, heterodyne efficiency, and suppression of rotation-to-pathlength coupling are investigated and compared with analysis results

Data Centric Domain Adaptation for Historical Text with OCR Errors

We propose new methods for in-domain and cross-domain Named Entity Recognition (NER) on historical data for Dutch and French. For the cross-domain case, we address domain shift by integrating unsupervised in-domain data via contextualized string embeddings; and OCR errors by injecting synthetic OCR errors into the source domain and address data centric domain adaptation. We propose a general approach to imitate OCR errors in arbitrary input data. Our cross-domain as well as our in-domain results outperform several strong baselines and establish state-of-the-art results. We publish preprocessed versions of the French and Dutch Europeana NER corpora