Naval Postgraduate School Monterey , California Thesis Segmented Mirror Telescope

The Segmented Mirror Telescope (SMT) housed at the Naval Postgraduate School is a unique, state-of-the-art optical instrument built to explore new technologies needed for future spacebased telescopes. A discrete Fourier transform wavefront reconstruction technique developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is discussed in this thesis as applied to a hexagonal aperture. A Fourier domain implementation of a spatial-frequency modal controller for a simple spring-mass model of a deformable mirror surface is provided by this thesis. This technique avoids more difficult time-domain solutions, is computationally efficient and scalable to much larger multi-input, multi-output systems than the SMT.