The Membrane Optical Imager Real-time Exploitation (MOIRE) program, being designed by Ball Aerospace and its partners for the Defense Advanced REDARPA, is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), seeks to enable technologies that would make orbital telescopes much lighter, more transportable and more cost-effective. MOIRE intends to design and develop a geosynchronous imager featuring a 10-meter diameter membrane optical element system at a distance 50 meters away from the spacecraft bus, with traceability to a future system with a 20-meter diameter primary optic. The program is preparing for a potential future space-based mission through large-scale, ground-based testing. Due to the overall system size, subsystem and component level testing is necessary to capture data for incorporation into larger analysis models. Stability testing of two full-scale composite strongback segments, including in a relevant environment, was performed to correlate preliminary models of the primary diffractive optical element structure. This paper discusses the testing approach and lessons learned.
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