Misadjustment tolerance study of the sub-mirror's for segmented mirror synthetic aperture optics

Segmented mirror synthetic aperture optics (SAO) systems have special requirements of tolerance budget. The misadjustment errors of sub-mirrors make the wavefront change heavily, and influence the imagining badly. An experimental demonstration system was built, which is a Cassegrin-type telescope, and the primary mirror is consisted of three sub-mirrors. ZYGO interferometer was used to sample the system's wavefront. The key point is to study the misadjustment tolerance budget. The results show that misadjustment error will change the wavefront heavily and have special relationship between PV and RMS of wave aberration. However, in some situation, the system still can get a rather good MTF curve.