Design and construction of an Offner spectrometer based on geometrical analysis of ring fields

Automated freeform imaging system design with generalized ray tracing and simultaneous multi-surface analytic calculation

Recently, freeform optics has been widely used due to its unprecedented compactness and high performance, especially in the reflective designs for broad-wavelength imaging applications. Here, we present a generalized differentiable ray tracing approach suitable for most optical surfaces. The established automated freeform design framework simultaneously calculates multi-surface coefficients with merely the system geometry known, very fast for generating abundant feasible starting points. In addition, we provide a "double-pass surface" strategy with desired overlap (not mutually centered) that enables a component reduction for very compact yet high-performing designs. The effectiveness of the method is firstly demonstrated by designing a wide field-of-view, fast f-number, four-mirror freeform telescope. Another example shows a two-freeform, three-mirror, four-reflection design with high compactness and cost-friendly considerations with a double-pass spherical mirror. The present work provides a robust design scheme for reflective freeform imaging systems in general, and it unlocks a series of new 'double-pass surface' designs for very compact, high-performing freeform imaging systems.

Optical Design of a Miniaturized Airborne Push-Broom Spectrometer

Combining the requirements of spectrometers for unmanned aerial vehicle platforms, a miniaturized airborne wide-angle push-broom imaging spectrometer with an Offner configuration is designed. The system comprises an objective lens and an Offner-type spectrometer with a spectral range of 400~1000 nm and a spectral resolution of 15 nm. The objective lens and Offner spectrometer are designed in isolation before integration. The front objective lens is an inverted telephoto with a focal length of 13 mm, a relative aperture of 1/4.5, and a field of view of 54°. The frequency of the convex grating in the Offner configuration is 102 LP/mm, and the dispersion width is 2.6 mm. The modulation transfer function of the integrated system is greater than 0.4 at the Nyquist frequency in all spectral bands. To estimate the volume and weight of the system, a preliminary optical–mechanical design scheme is given in this paper. The entire spectrometer has a volume of 130 × 80 × 120 mm and is less than 3 kg, which realizes the miniaturization design of the imaging spectrometer with a wide field of view for unmanned aerial vehicle platforms.