The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jan. 06, 1987
Filed:
Jun. 11, 1985
Alan J MacGovern, Acton, MA (US);
United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Air Force, Washington, DC (US);
Abstract
A process and apparatus are disclosed for aligning a laser beam from a laser transmitter with an incoming laser beam, and driving any sensed tilt differences on an aperture and subaperture basis to zero. The apparatus uses a shared aperture component to sample the outgoing laser beam and the incoming target beam, a retroreflector array to reverse the direction of the subaperture samples of the outgoing beam, a common-mode wavefront sensor to measure subaperture tilt differences between the reversed samples of the laser and the incoming target beam, and a deformable mirror to drive any sensed tilt differences to zero. A transparent beamsplitter is used as the shared aperture component and an AC shearing interferometer is used as the basis for the common-mode sensing. By forcing the outgoing beam to be then conjugate of the incoming beam it is automatically precompensated for any aberrations in the transmission path.