By segmenting and folding the primary mirror, quite large telescopes can be packed into the nose cone of a rocket. Deployed after launch, initial optical perofrmance can be quite poor, due to deployment errors, thermal deformation, fabrication errors and other causes. We describe an automatic control system for capturing, aligning, phasing, and deforming the optics of such a telescope, going from initial cm-level wavefront errors to diffraction-limited observatory operations. This system was developed for the Next Generation Space Telescope and is being tested on the NGST Wavefront Control Testbed.
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