Facility for concentrating cosmic radiation equipped with a reflective optical surface inspection system

Abstract

The invention relates to an apparatus for concentrating cosmic radiation originating from a celestial object, said apparatus comprising: a concentrating optical surface able to reflect incident cosmic radiation toward a target surface O'X′Y′, and liable to contain local surface errors and aiming and orientation errors; a system for inspecting the reflective optical surface; means for acquiring images of the optical surface from various viewpoints M′(X′, y′) that are located on the target surface, m varying from 1 to M and n varying from 1 to N, so as to obtain M×N images of the optical surface illuminated by the cosmic radiation, with M viewpoints along X′ and N viewpoints along Y′, where M>1, N>1 and M·N≥30; and a unit for processing the M·N acquired images, which unit is suitable for: calculating the slopes δΔ(P)/δx and δΔ(P)/δy for each point P(x,y) of the reflective optical surface, where: L(M′, P) being the luminance at a point of the image corresponding to the point P(x,y) of the reflective optical surface () observed from the viewpoint M′, εthe apparent angular radius of the celestial object and gand gpreset coefficients; and determining from these slopes δΔ(P)/δx and δΔ(P)/δy, a local surface error ΔP(x,y) at the point P(x,y) of the reflective optical surface ().