Twenty Meter Space Telescope Based on Diffractive Fresnel Lens

摘要

Diffractive lenses offer two potential advantages for very large aperture space telescopes; very loose surface-figure tolerances and physical implementation as thin, flat optical elements. In order to actually realize these advantages one must be able to build large diffractive lenses with adequate optical precision and also to compactly stow the lens for launch and then fully deploy it in space. We will discuss the recent fabrication and assembly demonstration of a 5m glass diffractive Fresnel lens at LLNL. Optical performance data from smaller full telescopes with diffractive lens and corrective optics show diffraction limited performance with broad bandwidths. A systems design for a 20m space telescope will be presented.