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At least 415 records · Page 23

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NASA NTRS2018

Alignment and Testing for a Freeform Telescope

Currently there is a strong desire to make Earth science less expensive. Freeform optics make these missions less expensive because they allow an optical designer to use fewer mirrors to create roughly the same effect. The main issue with using freeforms is how closely the substrate can be milled to its prescription. Over this summer, our team looked at two freeforms made by Corning Inc. using a brand new process to determine how close these optics are to their set prescriptions and how well NASA could align them.

Alignment↗

NASA NTRS2018

Second-Generation Design of Micro-Spec: A Medium-Resolution, Submillimeter-Wavelength Spectrometer-on-a-Chip

Micro-Spec (μ-Spec) is a direct-detection spectrometer which integrates all the components of a diffraction-grating spectrometer onto a ∼10-cm2 chip through the use of superconducting microstrip transmission lines on a single-crystal silicon substrate. A second-generation μ-Spec is being designed to operate with a spectral resolution of 512 in the submillimeter (500-1000 μm, 300-600 GHz) wavelength range, a band of interest for several spectroscopic applications in astrophysics. High altitude balloon missions would provide the first test bed to demonstrate the μ-Spec technology in a space-like environment and would be an economically viable venue for multiple observation campaigns. This work reports on the current status of the instrument design and will provide a brief overview of each instrument subsystem. Particular emphasis will be given to the design of the spectrometer's two-dimensional diffractive region, through which the light of different wavelengths is focused on the detectors along the focal plane. An optimization process is employed to generate geometrical configurations of the diffractive region that satisfy specific requirements on spectrometer size, operating spectral range, and performance. An optical design optimized for balloon missions will be presented in terms of geometric layout, spectral purity, and efficiency.

Cataldo, G.↗

NASA NTRS1974

Lower atmosphere composition and temperature experiment

Description of an optical design evolved as a result of such a unique set of experiment requirements as: high spatial and spectral resolution, the need to scan object space in both elevation and azimuth, and tight size and weight limitations dictated by typical spacecraft constraints. All of these requirements are shown to have been met in an optical system that has been built, tested, and flown under extremely tight schedule and cost constraints.

Williamson, W. R.↗

NASA NTRS2008

Design Study of 8 Meter Monolithic Mirror UV/Optical Space Telescope

The planned Ares V launch vehicle with its 10 meter fairing shroud and 55,000 kg capacity to the Sun Earth L2 point enables entirely new classes of space telescopes. NASA MSFC has conducted a preliminary study that demonstrates the feasibility of launching a 6 to 8 meter class monolithic primary mirror telescope to Sun-Earth L2 using an Ares V. Specific technical areas studied included optical design; structural design/analysis including primary mirror support structure, sun shade and secondary mirror support structure; thermal analysis; launch vehicle performance and trajectory; spacecraft including structure, propulsion, GN&C, avionics, power systems and reaction wheels; operations and servicing; mass and power budgets; and system cost.

Stahl, H. Philip↗

NASA NTRS1987

Polarization analysis of a balloon-borne solar magnetograph

The main text of the report contains the particular results of our research which relate to the Experimental Vector Magnetograph (EXVM) and the Balloon-borne Vector Magnetograph (BVM). A brief overview of which elements in the EXVM and BVM that are relevant to this polarization analysis are presented. The possible meaning of the 10(exp -5) polarization specification for the BVM is discussed qualitatively. A recommendation of which polarization specification is most relevant for the BVM is provided. A diattenuation budget for the various surfaces in the BVM which will allow the polarization specification to be met is discussed. An explanation of the various coating specifications which are recommended is presented. Optical design of the EXVM and coating specification sheets for the BVM are presented. The appendices of this report contain the more general results of our research on the general topic of polarization aberrations. A general discussion of polarization aberration theory, in terms of the SAMEX solar magnetograph, and rigorous derivations for the Mueller matrices of optical systems are also presented in the appendices.

Reiley, Daniel J.↗

NASA NTRS2019

Second-Generation Micro-Spec: A Compact Spectrometer for Far-Infrared and Submillimeter Space Missions

Micro-Spec is a direct-detection spectrometer which integrates all the components of a diffraction-grating spectrometer onto a ≈ 10-sq.cm chip through the use of superconducting microstrip transmission lines on a single- crystal silicon substrate. The second generation of Micro-Spec is being designed to operate with a spectral re- solution of at least 512 in the far-infrared and submillimeter (420–540 GHz, 714–555 μm) wavelength range, a band of interest for NASA's experiment for cryogenic large-aperture intensity mapping called EXCLAIM. EXCLAIM will be a balloon-borne telescope that is being designed to map the emission of redshifted carbon monoxide and singly-ionized carbon lines over a redshift range 0 < z < 3.5 and it will be the first demonstration of the Micro-Spec technology in a space-like environment. This work reviews the status of the Micro-Spec design for the EXCLAIM telescope, with emphasis on the spectrometer's two-dimensional diffractive region, through which light of different wavelengths is focused on kinetic inductance detectors along the instrument focal plane. An optimization process is used to generate a geometrical configuration of the diffractive region that satisfies l range and performance. An initial optical design optimized for n terms of geometric layout, spectral purity and efficiency.

Cataldo, Giuseppe↗

NASA NTRS1987

Temperature variable long path cell for absorption measurements

The design and construction of a long path cell for absorption measurements at temperatures ranging from 215-470 K and at pressures from vacuum to 10 atm are described. The cell consists of three concentric stainless-steel tubes; the innermost tube is 6.5-in. in internal diameter, has a volume of about 47 l, and contains White-type optics, six thermocouples, and a gas input tube; and the outermost tube provides a vacuum Dewar around the inner assembly. The optical design and temperature control system for the long path temperature variable cell are examined. The long path cell is applicable for analyzing temperature and pressure dependence of spectra and reaction rates of gases, and the cell has flow and photolysis capabilities for studying transient species and photochemically initiated reactions. A diagram of the cell is provided.

Shetter, R. E.↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Second-generation Micro-Spec: Spectrometer Design for the Experiment for Cryogenic Large-Aperture Intensity Mapping

Micro-Spec (μ-Spec) is a direct-detection spectrometer that integrates all the components of a diffraction-grating spectrometer onto a ∼10-cm2 chip using superconducting microstrip transmission lines on a single-crystal silicon substrate. The second-generation μ-Spec has been designed to operate with a spectral resolution of ∼512 in the far-infrared and submillimeter (420–540 GHz, 714–555 μm) wavelength range, a band of interest for NASA’s EXperiment for Cryogenic Large-Aperture Intensity Mapping (EXCLAIM). EXCLAIM will be a high-altitude balloon mission that is being designed to map the emission of redshifted carbon monoxide and singly-ionized carbon lines over a redshift range 0 < z < 3.5. EXCLAIM will be the first demonstration of the μ-Spec technology in a space-like environment. This work reviews the status of the μ-Spec design for the EXCLAIM instrument, with emphasis on the spectrometer’s two-dimensional diffractive region, through which light of different wavelengths is focused on microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) along the spectrometer focal plane. An optimization process generates a geometrical configuration of the diffractive region that satisfies specific requirements on size, operating spectral range and performance. An initial optical design optimized for EXCLAIM is presented in terms of geometric layout, spectral purity and efficiency.

Giuseppe Cataldo↗

NASA NTRS2023

Earth/Moon System Star Tracking Sensor for Improved Deep Space Laser Communications

The goal of this research is to improve deep space communication links by exploring a new concept in stellar navigation that uses images of the Earth/Moon system to obtain precise pointing information so that the laser signal from the satellite can be directed at the ground station with unprecedented accuracy. Currently, the concept for satellite pointing relies on a dual axis star tracker that compares images of the celestial sphere to a star catalog to obtain a 3-axis orientation solution. Most star trackers are designed with a wide field of view (required to obtain enough bright starts to achieve a navigational fix) and only provide reliable pitch and yaw estimates thus necessitating the use of a second star tracker looking at an axis perpendicular to the first one to obtain an accurate estimate of the roll of the spacecraft. In the new concept the optical design will be modified to ensure that both the Earth and the Moon will be within a narrow field of view centered on Earth relative to the field of view of most star tracking systems. Because of the proximity of the bodies, it is possible to obtain highly accurate estimates of the pitch, yaw and roll of the spacecraft relative to the Earth/Moon system. The new tracker will allow for accurate 3-axis control of the spacecraft from a single tracker thus allowing the second star tracker, which would normally be pointed in a direction perpendicular to the one pointed at earth, to obtain the spacecraft roll estimate. This wide field star tracker facilitates functions like the initial satellite pointing during the acquisition phase of establishing the laser communication link or solving the lost in space problem should the system need to be reset. This new design will be tested in simulation and compared for 3-axis pointing accuracy against a standard commercial star tracker.

Star tracker↗

NASA NTRS2008

Design Study of an 8 Meter Monolithic Mirror UV/Optical Space Telescope

This paper will review a recent NASA MSFC preliminary study that demonstrated the feasibility of launching a 6 to 8 meter class monolithic primary mirror telescope to Sun-Earth L2 using an Ares V. The study started with the unique capabilities of the Ares V vehicle and examined the feasibility of launching a large aperture low cost low risk telescope based on a conventional ground based glass primary mirror. Specific technical areas studied included optical design; structural design/analysis including primary mirror support structure, sun shade and secondary mirror support structure; thermal analysis; launch vehicle performance and trajectory; spacecraft including structure, propulsion, GN & C, avionics, power systems and reaction wheels; operations & servicing, mass budget and system cost. The study telescope was an on-axis three-mirror anastigmatic design with a fine steering mirror. The observatory has a 100 arc-minute (8.4 X 12 arc-minutes) of diffraction limited field of view at a wavelength les than 500 nm. The study assumed that the primary mirror would be fabricated from an existing Schott Zerodur residual VLT blank edged to 6.2 meters, 175 mm thick at the edge with a mass of 11,000 kg. The entire mass budget for the observatory including primary mirror, structure, light baffle tube, instruments, space craft, avionics, etc. is less than 40,000 kg - a 33% mass margin on the Ares V's 60,000 kg Sun-Earth L2 capability. An 8 meter class observatory would have a total mass of less than 60,000 kg of which the primary mirror is the largest contributor.

Stahl, H. Philip↗

NASA NTRS2011

Optical-Path-Difference Linear Mechanism for the Panchromatic Fourier Transform Spectrometer

A document discusses a mechanism that uses flex-pivots in a parallelogram arrangement to provide frictionless motion with an unlimited lifetime. A voicecoil actuator drives the parallelogram over the required 5-cm travel. An optical position sensor provides feedback for a servo loop that keeps the velocity within 1 percent of expected value. Residual tip/tilt error is compensated for by a piezo actuator that drives the interferometer mirror. This mechanism builds on previous work that targeted ground-based measurements. The main novelty aspects include cryogenic and vacuum operation, high reliability for spaceflight, compactness of the design, optical layout compatible with the needs of an imaging FTS (i.e. wide overall field-of-view), and mirror optical coatings to cover very broad wavelength range (i.e., 0.26 to 15 m).

Blavier, Jean-Francois L.↗

DOE OSTI2024

Unique optical excitations in topological insulators (Final Technical Report)

The overall objective of this research is to understand how light interacts with topological insulator (TI) films and layered structures. Unlike normal materials, the electrons in TI films are trapped at the top and bottom surfaces of the film. These electrons have unusual properties, including low mass and high velocity. Light shining on these trapped electrons will excite electron density waves, called plasmons, which inherit the unusual properties of the electrons. This project aims to understand how these plasmons interact with each other and how the plasmon properties change as the film dimensions change. By controlling the physical properties of the films, the optical response of the film can also be controlled. In addition to single TI films, the project will also investigate the properties of stacks of TI films layered with normal insulating films. Stacking these materials results in multiple layers of trapped electrons whose plasmons can interact in ever more complex ways. After these interactions are understood, we can begin to engineer complex TI structures to obtain designer optical phenomena in the far-infrared and THz, wavelength ranges of interest for environmental monitoring and chemical sensing. This research directly addresses DOE Grand Challenges, including understanding how properties of matter emerge from complex electronic correlations and learning how to control these properties as well as the mission of the Basic Energy Sciences program to understand and control matter at the electronic/atomic level.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

NASA NTRS2004

Mission Concept for the Single Aperture Far-Infrared (SAFIR) Observatory

We have developed a preliminary but comprehensive mission concept for SAFIR, as a 10 m-class far-infrared and submillimeter observatory that would begin development later in this decade to meet the needs outlined above. Its operating temperature (< or = 4K) and instrument complement would be optimized to reach the natural sky confusion limit in the far-infrared with diffraction-limited performance down to at least the atmospheric cutoff, lambda > or approx. 40 microns. This would provide a point source sensitivity improvement of several orders of magnitude over that of the Spitzer Space Telescope (previously SIRTF) or the Herschel Space Observatory. Additionally, it would have an angular resolution 12 times finer than that of Spitzer and three times finer than Herschel. This sensitivity and angular resolution are necessary to perform imaging and spectroscopic studies of individual galaxies in the early universe. We have considered many aspects of the SAFIR mission, including the telescope technology (optical design, materials, and packaging), detector needs and technologies, cooling method and required technology developments, attitude and pointing, power systems, launch vehicle, and mission operations. The most challenging requirements for this mission are operating temperature and aperture size of the telescope, and the development of detector arrays. SAFIR can take advantage of much of the technology under development for JWST, but with much less stringent requirements on optical accuracy.

Benford, Dominic J.↗

NASA NTRS2006

Distributed Computing Architecture for Image-Based Wavefront Sensing and 2 D FFTs

Image-based wavefront sensing (WFS) provides significant advantages over interferometric-based wavefi-ont sensors such as optical design simplicity and stability. However, the image-based approach is computational intensive, and therefore, specialized high-performance computing architectures are required in applications utilizing the image-based approach. The development and testing of these high-performance computing architectures are essential to such missions as James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Terrestial Planet Finder-Coronagraph (TPF-C and CorSpec), and Spherical Primary Optical Telescope (SPOT). The development of these specialized computing architectures require numerous two-dimensional Fourier Transforms, which necessitate an all-to-all communication when applied on a distributed computational architecture. Several solutions for distributed computing are presented with an emphasis on a 64 Node cluster of DSPs, multiple DSP FPGAs, and an application of low-diameter graph theory. Timing results and performance analysis will be presented. The solutions offered could be applied to other all-to-all communication and scientifically computationally complex problems.

Smith, Jeffrey S.↗

NASA NTRS2010

Advanced Wavefront Sensing and Control Testbed (AWCT)

The Advanced Wavefront Sensing and Control Testbed (AWCT) is built as a versatile facility for developing and demonstrating, in hardware, the future technologies of wave front sensing and control algorithms for active optical systems. The testbed includes a source projector for a broadband point-source and a suite of extended scene targets, a dispersed fringe sensor, a Shack-Hartmann camera, and an imaging camera capable of phase retrieval wavefront sensing. The testbed also provides two easily accessible conjugated pupil planes which can accommodate the active optical devices such as fast steering mirror, deformable mirror, and segmented mirrors. In this paper, we describe the testbed optical design, testbed configurations and capabilities, as well as the initial results from the testbed hardware integrations and tests.

active optics↗

NASA NTRS2020

50 Years of Spaceflight with Fourier Transform Spectrometers (FTS) Built at NASA GSFC

Over the past 50 years, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has been developing, building, testing and flying a series of Fourier Transform Spectrometers (FTS). This began with the IRIS instruments on the Earth-orbiting Nimbus satellites and progressed to more sophisticated designs optimized for interplanetary spacecraft sent to Mars and later to the outer solar system. Adaptions have been made over time, including progressively higher spectral resolution, sensitivity, numbers of detectors and complexity. Instrument operating temperatures have decreased to enable remote sensing of the cold giant planet systems. In this paper we describe the historical evolution of this instrument line, comparing and contrasting different aspects such as optical design and materials, detector types and data handling. We conclude by looking towards the future. At present the CIRS-Lite prototype is being tested at NASA GSFC for potential use on a future mission to the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune. Surpassing the previous performance of the Voyager IRIS instruments remains challenging, and new technologies that could enable these measurements are discussed.

Nixon, Conor A.↗

NASA NTRS2019

WFIRST Grism Characterization

We had presented the optical design and early test result of WFIRST grism spectrometer in previous SPIE conferences. This paper reports the follow-on activity of the spectral and radiometric calibrations, including the calibration methods, experiment designs, and test equipment calibration, such as the light source and detectors used in the test. The real grism calibration includes the throughput versus wavelength, which is largely determined by the diffraction efficiency of the two diffractive surfaces. It also includes spectral resolution, point spread function, and encircle energy measurements. The measured data are presented. The comparisons between the test data and the simulation from theory or optical model are also presented.

Optics↗

NASA NTRS1993

Non-invasive optical detection of glucose in cell culture nutrient medium

The objective of the proposed research was to begin the development of a non-invasive optical sensor for measuring glucose concentration in the output medium of cell cultures grown in a unique NASA bioreactor referred to as an integrated rotating-wall vessel (IRWV). The input, a bovine serum based nutrient media, has a known glucose concentration. The cells within the bioreactor digest a portion of the glucose. Thus, the non-invasive optical sensor is needed to monitor the decrease in glucose due to cellular consumption since the critical parameters for sustained cellular productivity are glucose and pH. Previous glucose sensing techniques have used chemical reactions to quantify the glucose concentration. Chemical reactions, however, cannot provide for continuous, real time, non-invasive measurement as is required in this application. Our effort while in the fellowship program was focused on the design, optical setup, and testing of one bench top prototype non-invasive optical sensor using a mid-infrared absorption spectroscopy technique. Glucose has a fundamental vibrational absorption peak in the mid-infrared wavelength range at 9.6 micron. Preliminary absorption data using a CO2 laser were collected at this wavelength for water based glucose solutions at different concentrations and one bovine serum based nutrient medium (GTSF) with added glucose. The results showed near linear absorption responses for the glucose-in-water data with resolutions as high at 108 mg/dl and as low as 10 mg/dl. The nutrient medium had a resolution of 291 mg/dl. The variability of the results was due mainly to thermal and polarization drifts of the laser while the decrease in sensitivity to glucose in the nutrient medium was expected due to the increase in the number of confounders present in the nutrient medium. A multispectral approach needs to be used to compensate for these confounders. The CO2 laser used for these studies was wavelength tunable (9.2 to 10.8 micrometers), however, it was to unstable across wavelengths to test the multispectral approach. From this research, further NASA support was obtained to continue the work throughout the year in which a more stable light source will be used at smaller, near-infrared, wavelengths. It is anticipated that a more compact, non-invasive, optical glucose sensor will be realized which can be used with a bioreactor on future space shuttle missions. It is also anticipated that a multispectral optical sensor may be used to determine the concentration of other molecules needed within the NASA bioreactor, such as fructose and galactose.

Cote, Gerald L.↗