Development of a Telescope Design System

An understanding of the relationship between off-nominal conditions and telescope performance can vastly improve the design and applications of space telescopes. To do this, an existing software system in MATLAB is modified in order to simulate the optical performance of lenses and mirrors that do not possess computational surfaces. Since perfect surfaces are definable by equations, their surface heights can be determined everywhere. However, off-nominal surfaces are characterized by discrete information, so inferring their positions becomes a necessary tool for simulation. These simulations are thus carried out by two means: First, various interpolation techniques are explored to compute the positions of the surfaces at all points. Second, methods for constructing surface normals are explored to allow an optimal focusing of incident light rays onto a screen. Moreover, the telescope design program is applied to an imported deformed geometry from a finite element analysis output of a real mirror model. This project falls under a class of analysis called Structural Thermal Optical Performance (STOP) Analysis, and it is hoped that the completion of this project will shed useful light on the design of optical instruments.