Three mirror anastigmat (TMA) telescope designs [1] had been implemented in different projects ranging from the narrow Field-Of-View large instruments as Quickbird (2° FOV) [2] to smaller telescopes as JSS 12° FOV developed for RapidEye mission [3].

This telescope configuration had been also selected for the PROBA-V payload, the successor of Vegetation, a multispectral imager flown on Spot-4 and subsequently on Spot-5 French satellites for Earth Observation and defence. PROBA-V, small PROBA-type satellite, will continue acquisition of vegetation data after the lifetime of Spot-5 expires in 2012.

The PROBA-V TMA optical design achieves a 34° FOV across track and makes use of highly aspherical mirrors. Such a telescope had become feasible due to the recently developed Single Point Diamond Turning fabrication technology. The telescope mirrors and structure are fabricated in aluminium and form an athermal optical system.

This paper presents the development of the compact wide FOV TMA, its implementation in PROBA-V multispectral imager and reviews optics fabrication technology that made this development possible. Furthermore, this TMA is being used in combination with a linear variable filter in a breadboard of a compact hyperspectral imager. Moreover, current technology allows miniaturization of TMA, so it is possible to use a TMA-based hyperspectral imager on a cubesat platform.

Date Published: 20 November 2017
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 10565, International Conference on Space Optics — ICSO 2010, 1056505 (20 November 2017); doi: 10.1117/12.2309101

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10565:
International Conference on Space Optics — ICSO 2010
Errico Armandillo; Bruno Cugny; Nikos Karafolas, Editor(s)