Multipath fine positioning beam director

Abstract

A beam directing device is provided which employs one or more mirrors mounted on a single rotatable shaft. The orientation of the shaft controls the rotational orientation of these directing mirror(s) to direct the beam toward any of a number of sample or reference cells. Behind each cell is a cube corner which reflects the beam back to the directing mirror(s) for reflection toward the detector. In one embodiment, a shaft encoded senses the orientation of the shaft, the encoder output being servoed against a position signal to coarsely rotate the shaft in order to direct the beam to a sample cell and thence to a spectrograph slit. A pair of slit diodes detect the beam overlap on each side of the slit and their output is used to accurately position the beam on the slit to within one second of arc and correct for deviations in beam direction.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.