Integration and alignment of ATLAS instrument engineering model components in Optical Development System Lab

摘要

The ATLAS Instrument for the ICESat-2 mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center required a test-bed to prove out new concepts before the mission launches in 2016. The Optical Development System (ODS) laboratory was created to use breadboard, prototype, and engineering-model levels of hardware and software to model and evaluate the ATLAS alignment system. A one meter parabolic mirror was used to create a collimated light beam to align prototype and engineering model transmitter and receiver optics and test closed-loop alignment algorithms. To achieve an error of less than two micro-radians, an active deformable mirror was used to correct the wave front to subtract out the collimator mount error.