Low-Order Aberration Suppression on Primary Mirror of the Togs for Satellite Downlink

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the development of transportable optical ground station (TOGS) as an important component of laser communication network. The object of this paper is a TOGS designed for optical LEO satellite downlink as well as for long-distance aircraft downlink. A composite gravity compensation mount is proposed to simplify and efficiently suppress the low-order aberrations of an 800 mm aperture primary mirror with variable orientation of the optical antenna of a TOGS as it changes pointing. In this study, first we describe the composition of the TOGS and the utility of each part. Second, taking the minimization of the primary mirror deformation as the optimization objective, we employ the particle swarm optimization algorithm to find the optima of several key structural parameters by Isight software. Next, the annular Zernike polynomials are adopted to fit the wavefront error over the entire surface of the primary mirror for describing low-order aberrations, proving that the composite mount effectively suppresses the wavefront error to smaller than ⋋ /27, as the elevation angle changes from the horizontal to the vertical one. Finally, the ZYGO interferometer wavefront detections show that, after eliminating fabrication imperfections, the RMS of the wavefront error over the entire surface of the mirrors for horizontal and vertical axes, due to deformation, are 0.04⋋ and 0.035⋋, respectively. Compared to the results of the fitted wavefront error, the relative errors are 9.5% and 8.1%. The results show the validity and feasibility of the optimized composite mount and the wavefront fitting method, which can prove its reference significance for the budget and allocation of the systematic wavefront error in meter-scale optical antenna of the TOGS for satellite downlink.