NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory will consist of a segmented telescope and high contrast coronagraph to characterize exoplanets for habitability. Achieving this objective requires an ultra-stable telescope with wavefront stability of picometers in certain critical modes. The NASA funded Ultra-Stable Large Telescope Research and Analysis – Technology Maturation program has matured key component-level technologies in 10 areas spanning an “ultra-stable” architecture, including active components like segment edge sensors, actuators and thermal hardware, passive components like low distortion mirrors and stable structures, and supporting capabilities like precision metrology. This paper will summarize the final results from the four-year ULTRA-TM program, including advancements in performance and/or path-to-flight readiness, TRL/MRL maturation, and recommendations for future work.
The 2020 decadal survey presents a clear message of the grand astronomy goals of the next decade and beyond, and of the urgent need for technology maturation that will enable the next flagship observatory to observe potentially habitable exoplanets. For a segmented implementation of a large ultra-stable telescope, low TRL areas such as segment sensing and control at the picometer scale have been identified as critical areas for significant technological improvements to accomplish the survey’s grand goals. We present exciting results on picometer scale sensing and actuation in certain temporal and spatial bandwidths as key advances towards addressing this technology gap. We have designed and demonstrated a capacitive testbed for informing different edge sensing architectures, and qualified our novel ultra-fine stage actuator using an optical distance measuring interferometer. We have also integrated the capacitive sensor and our ultra-fine stage actuator for an integrated demo with few picometer noise floor, sensing and actuator resolution. These key results will roll into the design of subscale demonstrations of these components in a future flight-like layout.
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