Design of a high throughput telescope based on scanning off-axis Three-Mirror Anastigmat system

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel high throughput telescope design based on a scanning off-axis Three-Mirror Anastigmat system, achieving a large field of view and high resolution suitable for remote sensing applications.

Contribution

It introduces a method to design a high throughput TMA telescope with a scanning mechanism, optimizing the system for minimal aberrations and practical implementation.

Findings

Achieved a telescope with F-number of 6 and 60°×1.5° FOV.

Demonstrated the feasibility through tolerance analysis.

Provided a design process for large FOV, high-resolution telescopes.

Abstract

High throughput optical system is defined to possess the features of both large field of view (FOV) and high resolution. However, it is full of challenge to design such a telescope with the two conflicting specifications at the same time. In this paper, we propose a method to design a high throughput telescope based on the classical off-axis Three-Mirror Anastigmat (TMA) configuration by introducing a scanning mechanism. We derive the optimum initial design for the TMA system with no primary aberrations through characteristic ray tracing. During the design process, a real exit pupil is necessitated to accommodate the scanning mirror. By gradually increasing the system's FOV during the optimization procedure, we finally obtained a high throughput telescope design with an F-number of 6, a FOV of 60$^{\circ}$*1.5$^{\circ}$, and a long focal length of 876mm. In addition, the tolerance analysis is also conducted to demonstrate the instrumentation feasibility. We believe that this kind of large rectangle FOV telescope with high resolution has broad future applications in the optical remote sensing field.