Optical system design of star sensor with long focal length and athermalization

Optical system is the core component of autonomous navigation star sensor to realize the collection of star light and high-precision attitude measurement. In this paper, the optical system of high precision star sensor was taken as the research object, the influence mechanism of the accuracy of optical system for detecting different color temperature stars were studied and analyzed. It is difficult to suppress the centroid drift caused by the changes of star color temperature and ambient temperature through later calibration, which needs to be controlled under the stage of optical design. The calculation model and allocation method of optical system design wavelength weight were established, and the performance evaluation was carried out. In addition to the conventional energy concentration, distortion and asymmetric aberrations, the centroid drift of star color temperature and ambient temperature change were proposed as the main index of accuracy evaluation. According to the application requirements, a long focal star sensor optical system based on space satellite platform was designed, with the focal length of 95 mm, the relative aperture of f 2.4, the field view of 8°× 8°, the spectrum range of 450-1 000 nm, and the energy concentration of more than 85% in 3×3 pixels. Based on the regular glass materials, the lateral color aberration of the optical system was corrected under ultra-wide spectral range and long focal. The lateral color aberration of the full field was less than 0.9 μm; The results of accuracy analysis show that the accuracy of centroid position is less than 0.36 μm in the range of 2 600-9800 K, and the change of focal length is less than 2.7 μm in the range of 0-40℃, and the accuracy of centroid position caused by temperature is less than 0.45 μm. Copyright ©2020 Infrared and Laser Engineering. All rights reserved.