Imaging freeform optical systems designed with NURBS surfaces

Michael P. Chrisp; Brian Primeau; Michael A. Echter

doi:10.1117/1.OE.55.7.071208

1 August 2016 Imaging freeform optical systems designed with NURBS surfaces

Michael P. Chrisp, Brian Primeau, Michael A. Echter

Author Affiliations +

Funded by: United States Air Force, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory Biomedical Line Program for the United States Air Force, Air Force, Defense Threat Reduction Agency under Air Force, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering under Air Force Contract, Defense Threat Reduction Agency under Air Force contract, U.S. Air Force

Optical Engineering, Vol. 55, Issue 7, 071208 (August 2016). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.55.7.071208

Abstract

The designs of two imaging freeform systems using nonuniform rational basis-spline (NURBS) optical surfaces are described. The first system, a 10 deg×9 degf/2 three-mirror anastigmat has four times higher spatial resolution over the image plane compared with the equivalent conventional rotational aspheric design, and 2.5 times higher resolution compared with a 10th-order XY polynomial freeform design. The mirrors for the NURBS freeform design have more than twice the asphericity than the conventional rotational and XY polynomial designs. In the second system, a Ritchey–Chretien telescope followed by a two-mirror NURBS freeform corrector is compared to a four-mirror Korsch telescope, for imaging to a visible-infrared imaging spectrometer. The freeform corrector design had 70% smaller spot sizes over the field and eliminated the large tertiary required in Korsch type design. Both of these NURBS freeform designs are possible due to a custom optical design code for fast accurate NURBS optimization, which now has parallel raytracing for thousands of NURBS grid points.

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.

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Michael P. Chrisp, Brian Primeau, and Michael A. Echter "Imaging freeform optical systems designed with NURBS surfaces," Optical Engineering 55(7), 071208 (1 August 2016). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.55.7.071208

Published: 1 August 2016

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