System for Off Axis Aberration Recognition (SOAR)

The U.S. Army and other services, as well as private organizations, have a never-ending need for optical shop testing of components and compound lens systems. Typically, commercial products like those offered by ZYGO and 4D Technology are some type of Fizeau or Twyman-Green interferometer. However, these are unsuitable for off-axis measurements and characterizing systems with many optical components. To fill this gap, MZA Associates Corporation and Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) propose to develop a wavefront (Zernike decomposition thereof) measurement system based on measuring point spread functions (PSFs), enabled by a custom phase-retrieval algorithm. The tasks include: 1) exploration of potential lens systems to test and their properties like pupil size, field of view, etc., 2) develop and test the Zernike solver with realistic aberrations and imagery, and 3) develop optical and CAD models for the measurement system concept.