Agile Multiple Aperture Imager Receiver Development

A variety of unconventional imaging schemes have been investigated in recent years that rely on small, unphased optical apertures subaperture to measure properties of an incoming optical wavefront and recover images of distant objects without using precisely figured, large-aperture optical elements. Such schemes offer several attractive features. They provide the potential to create very lare effective aperture that are expandable over time and can be launched into space in small pieces. Since the subapertures are identical in construction, they may be mass producible at potentially low cost. This final report presents a preliminary design for a practical low-cost optical receiver. The multiple aperture design has high sensitivity, wide field-of-view, and is lightweight. A combination of spectral, temporal, and spatial background suppression are used to achieve daytime operation at low signal levels. Modular packaging to make the number of receiver subapertures conveniently scalable is also presented. The design is appropriate to a ground-base proof-of-concept experiment for long-range active speckle imaging. Keywords SDIStrategic Defense Initiative.