The Pulsar Engineering Community Board

Hello,
I'm an electrical engineering student at university and me and a few other students are working on a project to build the performance ed. spectroscope (this is a requirement of our supervisor) with a linear 2d sample positioning system to create a map of the measurements. First of all, the size of the scanning area/bed should be around 100x100 mm. The step size requirement is not too strict, we're looking at about 1 mm.
We're thinking to utilize the solid powder cuvette, since it's aiming downwards, and shine the LASER onto the bed with the sample. Do you think this is a feasible approach? Or would it introduce problems with focal length or similar? Also, we're not sure how to position the bed underneath or how to enclose the entire system, so as to prevent outside radiation to interfere, or to minimize vibration.
I'd love to hear if anyone has any recommendations. I'd love to hear some recommendations on how to approach this problem, since none of us really have experience of optics.
Thanks a lot.

This is doable but you may have to think on a system for bed-leveling. Back of the envelope computation, I estimate the depth of field of the spot system to be in the order of 15 µm. Since we only need to collect light we can relax this a bit but I would aim for 100 µm maximum in a first iteration. That's 0.05° for your 100 mm bed so it clearly needs some tuning.