High accuracy alignment facility for the receiver and transmitter of the BepiColombo Laser Altimeter.
The accurate co-alignment of the transmitter to the receiver of the BepiColombo Laser Altimeter is a challenging task for which an original alignment concept had to be developed. We present here the design, construction and testing of a large collimator facility built to fulfill the tight alignment requirements. We describe in detail the solution found to attenuate the high energy of the instrument laser transmitter by an original beam splitting pentaprism group. We list the different steps of the calibration of the alignment facility and estimate the errors made at each of these steps. We finally prove that the current facility is ready for the alignment of the flight instrument. Its angular accuracy is 23 μrad.
Physikalisches Institut, Universität Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
Sumita
S
Chakraborty
Michael
M
Affolter
Kurt
K
Gunderson
Jakob
J
Neubert
Nicolas
N
Thomas
Thomas
T
Beck
Michael
M
Gerber
Stefan
S
Graf
Daniele
D
Piazza
Antoine
A
Pommerol
Guillaume
G
Roethlisberger
Karsten
K
Seiferlin