This thesis investigates various active control aspects of large aperture telescopes; both Earth-based and space telescopes are considered.The first part proposes a concept of piezoelectric adaptive thin shell reflector for future space telescopes; it exhibits excellent areal density and stowability, and thus, paves the way to future large aperture space telescopes. Controlling the surface figure of spherical or parabolic shell with in-plane stresses induced by a piezoelectric layer raises two problems: (i) Doubly curved shells are significantly stiffer than flat plates (especially for the optical modes associated with hoop strains) and (ii) When using segmented electrodes with different voltages, the surface figure is subject to edge fluctuations with a characteristic length depending on the reflector curvature R_c and thickness t according to sqrt(R_ct). Accurate surface figure corrections require that the electrode size D_e satisfies D_e<sqrt(R_ct). This results in a very large number of electrodes, leading to ill-conditioning in the Jacobian matrix of the system; to solve this, a hierarchical approach is proposed to inverse the Jacobian, based on Saint-Venant's principle. This chapter also proposes a petal configuration which aims at reducing the hoop stiffness and improving the foldability of the reflector. A small scale technology demonstrator has been manufactured in the framework of the ESA-GSTP project Multilayer Adaptive Thin Shell Reflectors for Future Space Telescopes (MATS). The demonstrator includes a polymer substrate (PEEK) and a spin-coated PVDF-TrFE piezoelectric layer activated by independent electrodes; it is used to validate the manufacturing process and the independent actuation of the electrodes.The second part deals with control-structure interaction in flat deformable mirrors for Adaptive Optics. The problem arises because of the increasing size of AO mirrors, leading to lower resonance frequencies, and the control bandwidth requirements to achieve a good wavefront error compensation. This chapter studies the conditions for spillover instability and highlights the main parameters controlling the phenomenon: the ratio between the control bandwidth and the resonance frequency and the modal damping. Two methods for damping augmentation are discussed, one passive, using inductive shunting of piezoelectric elements, and the other active, using the wavefront sensor and the array of control actuators as a modal filter.The third part focuses on the field stabilization control of the tip/tilt mirror under wind disturbances of the E-ELT telescope (a distinctive feature of the E-ELT as compared to other smaller telescopes is that it will be a wind-limited instead of a seeing-limited telescope). A literature survey is conducted of the spectral content of the wind disturbances on large telescopes, with a special attention on the high frequency decay rate. The analysis confirms the adequacy of a decoupled design of the field stabilization (M5) control loop. However, the reaction torques necessary to control the tip/tilt mirror M5 have been found to depend critically on the asymptotic decay rate of the wind tilt disturbance. These torques act as a disturbance on the telescope structure and, if the wind disturbance does not decay fast enough with the frequency (a>-3), it may generate significant wavefront errors in the primary mirror M1, in a frequency range (30-100Hz) which may be difficult to eliminate by Adaptive Optics. / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur et technologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished