Abstract: The primary aberration of each lens group will be changed with their movement, and the change of environment temperature will also lead to defocus, both of which will cause a lot of difficulties in the zoom lens design process. To solve this problem, aberration functions do depend and not depend on group movement were introduced based on optical aberration theory, and lens power distribution and material selection method were discussed with the achromatic and athermal design model futher. A visible-near infrared (Vis-Nir) optical system under the requirements of F/5, focal length of 8-120 mm, focal plane diameter of 6.2 mm, work waveband of 0.48-0.68 μm and 0.7-0.9 μm was designed with mechanically compensated method and optical passive athermal technology. The proposed zoom lens system, which used 7 kinds of common optical glass, consists of 12 groups 16 lenses, total length of only 90 mm, has good image quality and tolerance character among the zoom range within −40~60 ℃.