Design of detection optical system with large relative aperture

Abstract

With the advancement of aerospace technology, space debris generated by the collision and shedding of failed spacecraft is increasing, which threatens the safe operation of spacecraft in orbit seriously, and arouses people's attention to the detection of space debris. To achieve high-performance detection in dark environments, we propose a large relative aperture space-based detection optical system, which has a field of view of 16°, focal length of 182mm, F number of 1.52, and a working wavelength of 450~850nm. The system contains total 11 lenses, making the imaging performance more sensitive to temperature, therefore, we carry out thermal analysis for the system and use optical compensation method to achieve athermalized design. Finally, the system can work in the range of -10°C~+30°C, and the variation of the radius of the spot diagram with temperature is less than 3μm. In addition, we control the influence of stray light in the design process in order to observe bright and dark targets simultaneously. The numerical simulation results demonstrate that the veiling glare index of the system is 2.9%, which meets the requirement of dark object observation. The proposed optical system with large relative aperture and excellent imaging quality could be applied to accurate detection of space debris.