PILOT optical alignment

PILOT is a balloon-borne astronomy experiment designed to study the polarization of dust emission in the diffuse interstellar medium in our Galaxy at wavelengths 240 μm with an angular resolution about two arcminutes. Pilot optics is composed an off-axis Gregorian type telescope and a refractive re-imager system. All optical elements, except the primary mirror, are in a cryostat cooled to 3K. We combined the optical, 3D dimensional measurement methods and thermo-elastic modeling to perform the optical alignment. The talk describes the system analysis, the alignment procedure, and finally the performances obtained during the first flight in September 2015. © (2016) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.