Stages of commissioning alignment for three-mirror anastigmat (TMA) telescopes

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-stage alignment method for three-mirror anastigmat telescopes using a simple imaging sensor, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving diffraction-limited performance through simulation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-stage alignment procedure for TMA telescopes that uses a commercial sensor and is validated via Monte Carlo simulations.

Findings

Alignment method achieves diffraction-limited performance

Method successfully refines misalignments through stages

Validated with statistical Monte Carlo simulations

Abstract

Reliable, autonomously, deployment of telescopes enables a wide range of possible science cases. In this paper, we present a method for multi-stage telescope alignment with a simple commercial imaging sensor. For these studies, we use a design of an example three mirror anastigmat telescope and consider how the average spot size across the detector changes as a function of primary and secondary mirror positioning. This multi-stage alignment procedure will consist of three subprocesses, starting with a coarse alignment and converging down to a finer alignment before moving on to a stage where the telescope will refine its misalignments for data acquisition. This alignment strategy has been tested and meets diffraction limited requirements on a subset of misalignment cases from a statistical Monte Carlo simulation given misalignment tolerances on the telescope.