Improved Differential Wavefront Sampling algorithm for efficient alignment of Space optical system

The significant I&T process gain represented by reduction in overall budget expenditure can be obtained from the use of efficient alignment technique for large space optical systems. Such process gain tends to increase rapidly with an increase in aperture and/or in number of optical elements within the system. However, in practice, the alignment of multiple optical components tends to be rather difficult task because of the multiple coupling effects among the elements within the target system. In order to understand and hence identify the complex interplay of the wavefront coupling effects from the alignment process, the original differential wavefront sampling(DWS) method was presented elsewhere in recent years. DWS uses partial differential of the wavefront of optical component and perturbation value of the optical component against a particular alignment factor. The straightforward application of DWS for an off-axis optical system revealed that it tends to give incorrect estimation of the given misalignment state. In this study, we added off-axis correction terms to the original DWS algorithm and investigated its alignment performance. The performance simulation result for a Korsch type space optical system shows that the modified DWS is capable of bringing the misaligned system into the target alignment tolerance only after 3 iterations. It also shows that this new improved algorithm can be used to estimate the source misalignment as well. We are planning to apply this method for the alignment of a 800mm Korsch type telescope in the near future. We discuss the computational technique, simulation results and implications in details.