Development of a vacuum-compatible manipulator to calibrate wide field UV imagers for CubeSats

A vacuum-compatible manipulator was developed to calibrate the Miniaturized UltraViolet Imaging instrument (MUVI). The pointing resolution of the manipulator was evaluated, along with its ability to neutralize known optical misalignments. Field of View sweep tests were performed to quantify manipulator parameters using optical ground support equipment. Systematic errors were effectively reduced by a factor of 49 and 7 in the horizontal and vertical translation axes, respectively. Furthermore, the pointing resolution was measured to be less than 1 arcmin, which satisfied the instrument’s science calibration requirement.