The mini optical ground station (MISO), on top of the Aerospace Engineering faculty, serves the purpose of demonstrating Free Space Optical Communication technology. A downlink from low earth orbit imposes pointing requirements beyond what can be achieved by the telescope mount.
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The mini optical ground station (MISO), on top of the Aerospace Engineering faculty, serves the purpose of demonstrating Free Space Optical Communication technology. A downlink from low earth orbit imposes pointing requirements beyond what can be achieved by the telescope mount. A Fine Pointing Assembly (FPA), the topic of this thesis, aims to reduce residual pointing error to facilitate coupling into a single-mode fiber architecture. This thesis addresses the design, implementation, and characterization of FPA to fulfill this job in a lab environment. The FPA was built as a feedback control system actuating a fine steering mirror to counteract tip-tilt with feedback from a SWIR camera and the center of the gravity tracking algorithm. The bandwidth of this system is limited by latency from software implementations of the interfaces. The developed FPA removes 76% of the Tip-Tilt disturbance energy and can be improved by mitigation efforts toward latency reduction.
