NASA NTRS2007
It has been 370 years since a seventeenth century French mathematician, Mersenne, presciently sketched out an astronomical telescope based on dual parabolic reflectors. Since that time the concept of the primary objective has been virtually unchanged. Now a new class of astronomical telescope with a primary objective grating (POG) has been studied as an alternative. The POG competes with mirrors, in part, because diffraction gratings provide the very chromatic dispersion that mirrors defeat. The resulting telescope deals effectively with long-standing restrictions on multiple object spectroscopy (MOS). Other potential benefits include unprecedented apertures and collection areas. The new design also favors space deployment as a gossamer membrane. The inventor, Tom Ditto, first discovered that higher-order diffraction images contain hidden depth cues, for which he was granted a seminal range finding patent in 1987. Subsequently, he invented and patented 3D localizers, profilometers and microscopes using POGs. The POG telescope was placed in the public domain to expedite research. The function of a telescopes primary objective is to collect flux and to deliver images. Both functions dictate that size matters, and bigger is better. For that reason, there has been a steady push over the past century to ramp up the size of the primary mirror. However, for every doubling of mirror diameter, the elapsed time between initial effort and first light has also doubled. Meanwhile, costs escalated beyond the mirror alone, because larger instruments required larger enclosures and better pointing mechanisms. One key catalog of observation, spectrographic data, is far more difficult to amass than two-dimensional imagery. While the number of observable objects has increased with mirror size, the capacity to take spectra has not increased proportionately. In the best of circumstances, spectrograms are available for one per cent of the all objects surveyed. Spectroscopy was a historical afterthought introduced in the nineteenth century shortly after the invention of the diffraction grating and over a century after Newtons 1670 telescope. Spectroscopy is generally accomplished using a diffraction grating as the disperser in the secondary. The light being delivered to the spectrograph is first captured by a primary mirror which provides no chromatic magnification by itself. Sizeable spectrographs could not be deployed while diffraction gratings were rare commodities scribed using mechanical ruling engines that produced one grating line at a time. Today diffraction gratings are commonplace. Their recent availability is a product of both the invention of holography and the mass replication of surface microstructures. Holography permits all lines in a grating to be made simultaneously in a single photographic exposure. Holograms can then be reproduced by embossing processes. The improvement in replication is analogous to how Gutenberg changed the availability of books. The masters may be expensive, but the copies are not. Computer science is another technology that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century without which our proposed spectrographic instrument could not function due to the complexity of image processing required in data reduction. The employment of very large diffraction gratings as primary objectives for astronomical telescopes requires a novel