Space telescope with beam steering objective

Abstract

Disclosed is an entirely reflective space telescope featuring a segmented primary objective, simulating a refractive Fresnel lens, providing high optical efficiency over a wide spectral range. Each nonfocusing objective segment is all-reflective, having v-shaped mirrored elements for steering a portion of the incident light beam to a secondary focusing module, where an unobstructed wide angle secondary mirror focuses each segment's beam onto a dedicated mirror segment of an optical path corrector. This corrects path length errors, steers and focuses the beams, equally timed and in phase, to an image sensor. A sparsely segmented objective gives larger apertures. For greater apertures, a sparse primary objective and fully tiled secondary relay objective are combined with fully tiled and sparse optical path correctors. A flotilla of fully tiled segmented telescopes can support either amplitude-phase or intensity interferometry. Coronagraphs and starshade occluders can be included to reduce diffraction noise from bright sources.