Two beam interferometers have been proposed for space applications such as sensing the shape of a large antenna. Since alignment and adjustment of interferometers have long been considered difficult laboratory tasks, the question of making their operation sufficiently automatic for space applications is a serious one. As a first step in addressing this question certain manual procedures, which may not be well known, have been collected from widely scattered sources. These techniques are illustrated by two examples: (1) the alignment of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and the adjustment of fringe location. (2) The adjustment of a Michelson interferometer for zero path difference (white light fringes). .

Date Published: 31 December 1980
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 0251, Optical Alignment I, (31 December 1980); doi: 10.1117/12.959460

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0251:
Optical Alignment I
Richard N. Shagam; William C. Sweatt, Editor(s)