Abstract

In 1985/86 Itek Optical Systems designed, built, and tested a subscale prototype of a polarization shearing interferometer called the Field Scale Wavefront Sensor for SDIO under contract to the Rome Air Development Center. The full scale sensor was designed to measure monochromatic, pulsed wavefronts on a 64x64 sampling grid (4000 subapertures), at rates up to 10,000 wavefronts per second. These data rates would have been achieved using 8 separate, multi-port self-scanned photodiode arrays. Each array required a gated intensifier both to act as a shutter and to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the otherwise noisy arrays.

© 1992 Optical Society of America