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arXiv · 2508.19338

Stages of commissioning alignment for three-mirror anastigmat (TMA) telescopes

Solvay Blomquist·Heejoo Choi·Hyukmo Kang·Hayden Kim·Kevin Derby·Pierre Nicolas·Joanna Rosenbluth·Patrick Ingraham·Ewan S. Douglas·Daewook Kim
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Abstract

Reliable, autonomously, deployment of telescopes enables a wide range of possible science cases. In this paper, we present a method for multi-stage telescope alignment with a simple commercial imaging sensor. For these studies, we use a design of an example three mirror anastigmat telescope and consider how the average spot size across the detector changes as a function of primary and secondary mirror positioning. This multi-stage alignment procedure will consist of three subprocesses, starting with a coarse alignment and converging down to a finer alignment before moving on to a stage where the telescope will refine its misalignments for data acquisition. This alignment strategy has been tested and meets diffraction limited requirements on a subset of misalignment cases from a statistical Monte Carlo simulation given misalignment tolerances on the telescope.

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Solvay Blomquist, Heejoo Choi, Hyukmo Kang, Hayden Kim, Kevin Derby, Pierre Nicolas, Joanna Rosenbluth, Patrick Ingraham, Ewan S. Douglas, Daewook Kim. 2025-08-26. Stages of commissioning alignment for three-mirror anastigmat (TMA) telescopes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19338

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