Autonomous tip/tilt alignment and phasing of a distributed aperture imaging testbed

Star-9 is an experimental demonstration of distributed aperture imaging built at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center. White light from a scene generator enters an array of nine actively controlled telescopes, and is combined at a focused image plane. This paper describes the algorithms used to automatically bring each telescope's relative tip/tilt and phasing errors to within the operational range of the control system. The algorithms work with point-sources as well as with extended scenes. Experimental results and software algorithms are presented.