The James Webb Space Telescope architecture includes a 6.5 meter diameter telescope having a segmented primary mirror that will deploy after it launches. To perform like a single monolithic mirror, a wavefront sensing and control subsystem is required to sense and then correct any errors in the optics.
Ball Aerospace has engineered a scaled telescope testbed which is traceable to the flight telescope so that wavefront sensing and control can be developed and demonstrated in a high-fidelity environment. An image of the testbed telescope is shown at left.
Each of the 9 distinct alignment processes - the algorithms - needed to align the deployed telescope into a high-performance astronomical telescope have been designed and demonstrated on the testbed.
For more technical information on the wavefront sensing and control testing process, please view the article in Newsletter #2.
Here are two videos showing the scaled telescope testbed for wavefront sensing and control testing.
