Damping and Isolation Concepts for Vibration Suppression and Pointing Performance

Current state-of-the-art space exploration missions have stringent wavefront errors and pointing requirements in the few nanometers and miliarcsecond range. Achieving this level of precision is not an easy feat. Optical telescope designs often employ very large primary mirrors which can be susceptible to jitter and acoustic loads during launch. Reaction-wheel induced disturbances must be mitigated using a layered approach to isolation and damping, and structural resonances contributing to line-of-sight vibrations must be attenuated. Several damping and isolation approaches are discussed, including viscoelastic constrainedlayer damping and magnetic tuned-mass damping of a mirror segment, passive isolation of spacecraft disturbances, and active optical telescope pointing control. Results show that a layered approach may be required for the next generation of space telescopes.