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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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.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

08 Faculty of Science > Physics Institute > Space Research and Planetary Sciences
08 Faculty of Science > Physics Institute

UniBE Contributor:

Chakraborty, Sumita, Affolter, Michael, Gunderson, Kurt, Thomas, Nicolas, Beck, Thomas, Gerber, Michael, Graf, Stefan, Piazza, Daniele, Pommerol, Antoine, Röthlisberger, Guillaume, Seiferlin, Karsten Michael

Subjects:

500 Science > 520 Astronomy
600 Technology > 620 Engineering

ISSN:

0003-6935

Publisher:

Optical Society of America

Submitter:

Factscience Import

Date Deposited:

04 Oct 2013 14:43

Last Modified:

02 Mar 2023 23:22

Publisher DOI:

10.1364/AO.51.004907

PubMed ID:

22781273

Web of Science ID:

000306291100045

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.17979

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/17979 (FactScience: 225823)

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