Tinsley, under JWST funding, has led the team that has developed a novel and highly versatile piece of ground support equipment for optical surface testing of JWST beryllium mirror segments during optical fabrication. The infrared Scanning Shack Hartmann System (SSHS) offers the advantage of being able to characterize mid-to-high spatial frequency structure on a mirror from early stages of fabrication when slopes may be high and surface irregular, eliminating the need for an extra polishing step before metrology. Working at 9.3um, the system will accept and measure a wide dynamic range of surface characteristics, including roll-off near the edge of the segment. Knowledge of these surface features at the early grinding stage is imperative if characteristics such as mirror edge roll-off are to be minimized. WaveFront Sciences, producer of commercial COAS™ and Columbus™ Shack Hartmann systems, has provided systems engineering and component support for the SSHS system.The SSHS system is based around a special Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) wavefront sensor developed by WaveFront Sciences that is scanned over the mirror surface, making sub-aperture measurements. The smaller, high-resolution measurements are then stitched together to provide high-resolution measurement of the entire mirror surface, even though the surface is in a rough ground state.The system leverages technology from smaller visible instrumentation produced by Wavefront Sciences, especially those for surface sub-aperture measurements of semiconductor wafers. Although the scale of the SSHS is significantly larger than previous applications, substantial commercial technology is directly applicable to the Infrared SSHS with little or no modification. Extensive use was made of existing algorithms for frame stitching and focal spot centroiding. This paper will describe the implementation of the first infrared scanning Shack Hartmann system at Tinsley to address optical fabrication optimization of the JWST Primary Mirror Segments.
The 1.4-meter semi-rigid, beryllium Advanced Mirror System Demonstrator (AMSD) mirror completed initial cryogenic testing at Marshall's X-ray Calibration Facility (XRCF) in August of 2003. Results of this testing show the mirror to have very low cryogenic surface deformation and possess exceptional figure stability. Additionally, the mirror substrate exhibits virtually no change in surface figure over the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) operational temperature range of 30 to 62 Kelvin. The lightweighted, semi-rigid mirror architecture approach demonstrated here is a precursor to the mirror technology being applied to the JWST observatory. Testing at ambient and cryogenic temperatures included the radius of curvature actuation system and the rigid body displacement system. These two systems incorporated the use of 4 actuators to allow the mirror to change piston, tilt, and radius of curvature. Presented here are the results of the figure change, alignment change, and radius change as a function of temperature. Also shown will be the actuator influence functions at both ambient and cryogenic temperatures.
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