Ray tracing (physics)

Primary mirror

Pupil

Rectangle

Instrumentation (computer programming)

Geometry

Telecommunications

Physics

Field of view

Optical telescope

Mathematics

Wireless

Optics

Telescope

Operating system

Adaptive optics

Computer science

Exit pupil

Deformable mirror

Throughput

Secondary mirror

Applied Optics

High throughput optical system is defined to possess the features of both large field of view (FOV) and high resolution. However, it is full of challenge to design such a telescope with the two conflicting specifications at the same time. In this paper, we propose a method to design a high throughput telescope based on the classical off-axis Three-Mirror Anastigmat (TMA) configuration by introducing a scanning mechanism. We derive the optimum initial design for the TMA system with no primary aberrations through characteristic ray tracing. During the design process, a real exit pupil is necessitated to accommodate the scanning mirror. By gradually increasing the system's FOV during the optimization procedure, we finally obtained a high throughput telescope design with an F-number of 6, a FOV of 60$^{\circ}$*1.5$^{\circ}$, and a long focal length of 876mm. In addition, the tolerance analysis is also conducted to demonstrate the instrumentation feasibility. We believe that this kind of large rectangle FOV telescope with high resolution has broad future applications in the optical remote sensing field.

Design of a high-throughput telescope based on scanning an off-axis three-mirror anastigmat system