Abstract Telescopes with large aspherical primary mirrors collect more light and are therefore sought after by astronomers. Instead of using a single large one-piece mirror, smaller segments can be assembled into a useable telescopic primary. Because the segments must fit together to create the effect of a single mirror, segmented optics present unique challenges to the fabrication and testing that are absent in monolithic optics. A dispersed fringe sensor (DFS) using a broadband point source is an efficient method for cophasing and is also highly automated and robust. Unlike the widely adopted Shack-Hartmann Wavefront sensor and curvature wavefront sensor with edge sensors for calibration of relative pistons, DFS can estimate the piston between segments by only using the spectrum formed by the transmissive grating’s dispersion, and therefore can replace the edge sensors, which are difficult to calibrate. We introduce the theory of the DFS and Dispersed Hartmann Sensor (DHS) for further utilization of the coarse phasing method of DFS. According to the theory, we bring out the preliminary system design of the cophasing experimental system based on DFS and DHS which is now established in our institute. Finally, a summary is reached.

Keywords instrumentation: active optics — techniques: image processing — techniques: spectroscopic— telescope: cophasing sensor

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