Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Thales Alenia Space

Participants : David Daney [correspondant] , Thibault Gayral, Jean-Pierre Merlet.

Thales Alenia Space, in partnership with the Coprin team, is studying a new concept of active space telescope. Based on a parallel architecture, its structure allows not only the telescope deployment in space but also the accurate positioning of the secondary mirror with respect to the primary one in order to improve the provided images quality. The deployment and re-positioning concepts were validated thanks to a first prototype, and the telescope performances improvement is currently under study. A first study brought to light the front-seat role of mechanical joints on the structure accuracy. However, in order to deal with the required optical accuracy and space constraints, those mechanical joints had to be replaced by flexible ones. A new prototype was then designed and built in order to validate its ability to ameliorate its images quality using flexible joints. The goal of this project is to self-calibrate the mechanical structure of the telescope: using only proprioceptive information, parameters of the robot model will be identified. Thus, a space telescope based on this concept will be able to reach its final orbit, and then to improve its image accuracy thanks to an autonomous procedure.