Accession Number:
ADA455202
Title:
Lightweight In-Plane Actuated Deformable Mirrors for Space Telescopes
Descriptive Note:
Doctoral thesis, Sep 2003-Sep 2006
Corporate Author:
AIR FORCE INST OF TECH WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB OH SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT
Personal Author(s):
Report Date:
2006-09-01
Pagination or Media Count:
239.0
Abstract:
This research focused on lightweight, in-plane actuated, deformable mirrors, with the ultimate goal of developing a 20- meter light gathering aperture for space telescopes. The 0.127 meter diameter deformable mirror small scale testbed was modelled in nite elements using MSC.Nastran software and then used as a basis for a quasi-static controller. Experi- mental tracking of Zernike tip, tilt, and defocus modes was accomplished. The analytical solutions to plate-membrane and beam-string ordinary dierential equations were developed. A simplied approach to modelling the axisymmetric cases was also presented. A novel static control strategy, the Modal Transformation Method, was developed to form Zernike surfaces within an interior, or clear aperture, region using a number of statically-actuated Bessel-based vibration modes. The scaling problem for membrane optics is addressed. Signicantly, it is shown linear modelling may correctly explain the behavior of small-scale models, but only non-linear models will account for the important terms which govern the full-scale large aperture membrane telescopes.
Descriptors:
Subject Categories:
- Optics
- Unmanned Spacecraft