Experiments on active optical and structural control

A nanometer-level optical path-length control experiment for a large baseline space interferometer has been implemented on the JPL Phase B testbed. The experiment consisted of a multilayer control of active structural control to augment structural damping and active path-length control to directly compensate for optical path-length variation. The approach has been successful in maintaining the optical path-length variation within 3 nm root-mean-square (RMS) under the laboratory ambient disturbance.<
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