The spiral-grooved structure has been proposed for promoting the load capacity and stiffness of hybrid air journal bearings. In this paper, the dynamic characteristics of spiral-grooved hybrid bearings are first calculated. The stability criteria of the bearings are proposed and analyzed with different groove structure parameters using frequency domain analysis. It is found that the length of the spiral-groove has significant influence on the stability of the spindle system. Finally, the critical speed of the spiral-grooved hybrid bearing and rotor system is analyzed, and an experiment is carried out to validate the proposed model, finding that groove structure can promote the stability of the air bearing systems.

Environmental stability technology plays an important role in improving the adaptive range, image resolution and ensuring the stability of geometric parameters of aerial mapping camera. Traditional environmental stability methods directly implement active and passive thermal design to optical systems, which is easy to lead to radial temperature difference of optical components, and cannot eliminate the influence of pressure change. To solve the above problem, a method of environment stability design based on multi-dimensional structure is proposed. Firstly, the aerial mapping camera is designed as imaging system component (core) and sealing cylinder (periphery), and a sealed air insulation sandwich is formed between the two parts to realize the sealing design. A thermal interface is reserved outside the seal to avoid the radial thermal stress caused by direct heating of the optical parts, and a multi-dimensional Environmental stability structure is formed. Secondly, the core and the external thermal environment of aerial mapping camera in complex aviation environment are modeled and theoretically analyzed. Finally, the effectiveness and stability of the multi-dimensional structure method is verified by the thermal simulation and the flight. The results show that the thermal control power is 240 W, the thermal gradient of the optical system is less than 5 °C, the radial temperature difference is less than 0.5 °C. High quality image and ground measurement accuracy are obtained. Compared with tradition thermal control methods, the proposed method has the advantages of accuracy and low power consumption, which can effectively reduce the power consumption and difficulty of the thermal control.

In order to meet the accuracy requirements of target geo-location of a wide-area reconnaissance camera, it is necessary to calibrate the extrinsic parameters of the camera. A novel calibration method is proposed for the orientation relationship between the camera coordinate system (CCS) and the frame coordinate system (FCS). First, the calibration between the roll axis of the FCS and the CCS is carried out based on the method of the extended Kalman filter. Second, the calibration between the pitch axis of the FCS and the CCS is deduced based on the least mean square combined with the particle swarm optimization method. Then, the calibration accuracy of the proposed method is quantitatively analyzed by numerical simulation. Finally, a calibration experiment is conducted on verifying the effectiveness of the method.

The traditional passive heat dissipation method has low heat dissipation efficiency, which is not suitable for the heat dissipation of the concentrated heat source inside the long-focal aerial camera, resulting in temperature level changes and temperature gradients in the optical system near the heat source, which seriously affect the imaging performance of the aerial camera. To solve this problem, an active heat dissipation method of liquid cooling cycle is proposed in this paper. To improve the solving efficiency and ensure simulation accuracy, a dynamic boundary information transfer method based on grid area weighting is proposed. The thermal simulation results show that the liquid cooling method reduces the heat source temperature by 70.12%, and the boundary temperature transfer error is 0.015%. The accuracy of thermal simulation is verified by thermal test, and the simulation error is less than 6.44%. In addition, the performance of the optical system is further analyzed, and the results show that the MTF of the optical system is increased from 0.077 to 0.194 under the proposed active liquid cooling cycle heat dissipation method.