The design of off all-reflective zoom system for space application

The difficulty or even the impossibility of manufacturing of lenses with large apertures results in optical systems holding at least two mirrors, serving as the primary and the secondary mirrors respectively, are widely used in space application to realize large apertures, long focal lengths and high resolution, etc. Some of these optical systems fall into the catadioptric group, and others are all-reflective ones. What is more, the latter ones take the advantage of chromatic-aberration-free and the possibility of further lightening. To get an achromatic, light-weighted and compact zoom optical system with a large aperture, a long focal length and high solution, the all-reflective zoom system becomes an ideal choice. A method is described for the design of mechanically compensated reflective zoom systems with 3 mirrors. The method is based on the 3rd-order aberration theory. The advantage of this method is that, through constrained optimization of a set of Seidel aberration coefficient functions, it allows the designer to achieve the initial construction parameters of the optical system, and the design results prove the feasibility of this method.