High accuracy alignment facility for the receiver and transmitter of the BepiColombo Laser Altimeter

Chakraborty, Sumita; Affolter, Michael; Gunderson, Kurt; Neubert, Jakob; Thomas, Nicolas; Beck, Thomas; Gerber, Michael; Graf, Stefan; Piazza, Daniele; Pommerol, Antoine; Röthlisberger, Guillaume; Seiferlin, Karsten (2012). High accuracy alignment facility for the receiver and transmitter of the BepiColombo Laser Altimeter. Applied optics, 51(20), pp. 4907-4915. Washington, D.C.: Optical Society of America 10.1364/AO.51.004907

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Text ao-51-20-4907.pdf - Published Version Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. This paper was published in Applied Optics and is made available as an electronic reprint with the permission of OSA. Systematic or multiple reproduction or distribution to multiple locations via electronic or other means is prohibited and is subject to penalties under law. Download (620kB) | Preview

The accurate co-alignment of the transmitter to the receiver of the BepiColombo Laser Altimeter is a challenging task for which an original alignment concept had to be developed. We present here the design, construction and testing of a large collimator facility built to fulfill the tight alignment requirements. We describe in detail the solution found to attenuate the high energy of the instrument laser transmitter by an original beam splitting pentaprism group. We list the different steps of the calibration of the alignment facility and estimate the errors made at each of these steps. We finally prove that the current facility is ready for the alignment of the flight instrument. Its angular accuracy is 23 μrad.

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