Off-Axis Aspheric Surfacing Using Sub-Aperture Tools

The off-axis aspheric surface used in modern optical systems widely can obtain nearly perfect quality, realize both small packet-size and low-mass, and avoid the central obscuration. But it is difficult to fabricate because of asymmetry. There are some key technologies during the testing and fabrication of off-axis asphere. In this article, we proposed a method of the best fit sphere based on non-negative minimized removal criterion. And a measured data fitting algorithm was presented to estimate the geometry parameters of off-axis aspheric surface. Then an off-axis mirror was fabricated, and the interferometrically measured data was corrected to eliminate the distortion introduced by null compensator in every run. Finally, the surface error of off-axis mirror reduced to pv = 0.372λ, rms = 0.046λ, the surface roughness reached 0.72 nm. These methods mentioned in the article are suitable for off-axis aspheric optics.