Optics ellipticity performance of an unobscured off-axis space telescope

With the development of astronomy, more and more attention is paid to the survey of dark matter. Dark matter cannot be seen directly but can be detected by weak gravitational lensing measurement. Ellipticity is an important parameter used to define the shape of a galaxy. Galaxy ellipticity changes with weak gravitational lensing and nonideal optics. With our design of an unobscured off-axis telescope, we implement the simulation and calculation of optics ellipticity. With an accurate model of optics PSF, the characteristic of ellipticity is modeled and analyzed. It is shown that with good optical design, the full field ellipticity can be quite small. The spatial ellipticity change can be modeled by cubic interpolation with very high accuracy. We also modeled the ellipticity variance with time and analyzed the tolerance. It is shown that the unobscured off-axis telescope has good ellipticity performance and fulfills the requirement of dark matter survey. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America