Abstract

A requirement exists for a spaceborne optical telescope with a field of view of 0.25° and a resolution corresponding to an effective aperture size of ten meters or larger. One possible design is known as a phased array imaging telescope. This consists of a series of subtelescopes, with apertures substantially smaller than ten meters, and a beam combination telescope, which combines the subtelescope images into a single global image. The configuration is such that the optical path length, through any subtelescope to the global image surface, is the same for any point on a plane wavefront entering the phased array telescope. This optical phasing should occur simultaneously at all field points. Previous designs contain refractive optical components, and thus operate only over a narrow spectral range. In this paper, several all-reflective designs which meet or exceed the above imaging requirements will be presented.

© 1990 Optical Society of America