A Four Telescope Wide Field of View Phased Array

Abstract

A phased array telescope is an array of optical telescopes whose images are coherently combined so as to achieve the resolution of a single but much larger telescope. Design of a wide field of view phased array imaging system is considerably more difficult than phased array beam transmission telescopes such as PHASAR,1 which has no field of view. In addition to maintaining optical phase to a fraction of a wavelength on the optic axis, an imaging telescope must accurately control phase and align the images from all telescopes to within a fraction of a resolution element over the whole field of view simultaneously. This requires lateral pupil geometry3 that is extremely close to the ideal.