Photon sieve telescope

Geoff Andersen; Drew Tullson

doi:10.1117/12.669524

14 June 2006 Photon sieve telescope

Geoff Andersen, Drew Tullson

Proceedings Volume 6265, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation I: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter; 626523 (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.669524
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2006, Orlando, Florida , United States

Abstract

In designing next-generation, ultra-large (>20m) apertures for space, many current concepts involve compactable, curved membrane reflectors. Here we present the idea of using a flat diffractive element that requires no out-of-plane deformation and so is much simpler to deploy. The primary is a photon sieve - a diffractive element consisting of a large number of precisely positioned holes distributed according to an underlying Fresnel Zone Plate (FZP) geometry. The advantage of the photon sieve over the FZP is that all the regions are connected, so the membrane substrate under simple tension can avoid buckling. Also, the hole distribution can be varied to generate any conic or apodization for specialized telescope requirements such as exo-solar planet detection. We have designed and tested numerous photon sieves as telescope primaries. Some of these have over 10 million holes in a 0.1 m diameter aperture and all of them give diffraction limited imaging. While photon sieves are diffractive elements and thus suffer from dispersion, we will present two successful solutions to this problem.

Citation Download Citation

Geoff Andersen and Drew Tullson "Photon sieve telescope", Proc. SPIE 6265, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation I: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter, 626523 (14 June 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.669524

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