Laboratory imaging stellar interferometer with fiber links

We report on the implementation of an end-to-end imaging demonstrator to validate the concept of optical fiber use in high-resolution aperture synthesis in astronomy As the coherent transport of light has been conclusively investigated, this study is focused primarily on the accuracy and reliability of the experimental data. In the framework of the European Space Agency project Optical Aperture Synthesis Technologies (OAST), the telescope array's complexity is minimized such that a realistic concept for a future space mission can be proposed. The reconstructed images are obtained by use of a particular self-calibration procedure that was designed to process the visibility contrast and the related weak phase information (one phase closure for each visibility triplet). (C) 2000 Optical Society of America. OCIS codes: 070.6020, 100.3020, 110.2350, 110.5100, 120.3930, 120.3180, 120.5050, 120.4640.