Novel method of computer-aided alignment for large aperture space systems

For the precise alignment for the large aperture space optical systems, we report a feasible way of Computer-aided alignment (CAA) in detail in this paper. Different CAA algorithms are introduced and we used two of them to do the CAA simulation for a self-made coaxial three-mirror optical system. The methods of the wavefront detecting and object source's providing have been put forward for the actual alignment. Based on these methods, CAA results are shown using the sensitivity table algorithm and the merit function regression method respectively. Comparisons are made between these two methods, and the results show that the merit function method shows higher accuracy when the initial misalignments are large.