Project 5

This project concerns the exploration and evaluation of three families of optical geometries of telescopes for multispectral and hyperspectral imaging for planetary orbital instrumentation. Over the last 70 years, there have been only a small number of telescope systems designed for planetary spectral imagers, all of which have well-documented limitations in either field-of-view, available spectral bandwidth, spatial resolution, or imaging performance. However, the task of designing new optical geometries is inherently a trial-and-error investigation and is rarely easy to justify as part of instrument development or field campaign funded efforts. As a result, the few extant designs have been used even when the optical or spectral characteristics of the scientific investigation would have benefited from a significantly different geometry and subsequently resulted in less than ideal results. Over the last 10 years, the mentor of this project has compiled a list of three families of altered optical geometry that would reduce the cost of telescopes, extend the optical performances in the mentioned characteristics of FoV, supportable spectral bandwidth, or spatial resolution. To be clear, these families of geometries are not expected to accommodate performance enhancements in all three of these criteria simultaneously, but rather they would generate a tradeoff framework that would provide the remote sensing community with flexibility on the optimization of performance metrics. The mentor will explore these geometries with the mentee and work towards publishing an engineering analysis and application evaluation for each family. The student would benefit from learning Zemax, optical design and gain a greater understanding of the optical needs of remote sensing investigations. A stretch goal would
be to set up designs that could be manufactured and tested in a future project.

The student will begin by learning the background optical theory and prior state of the art. The mentor will introduce the student to the optical geometries, Zemax optical modeling and set them on a course of exploring the evaluation space of the designs. This project is going to be somewhat time intensive. The student would ideally be able to spend 10 hours a week working on this exploration. At least two of these hours will be spent with the mentor. This project is somewhat scalable in that depending upon the student’s acumen, one or all three of the geometries may be explored during these two geometries. The project will lean toward a full analysis of one of the optical families rather than a partial analysis of all three. The student will leave this with the marketable skill of optical modeling with the software Zemax and be a co-author in an optical engineering manuscript. A computer with Zemax and all other materials are available to the student already in the laboratory of the mentor.

The expected results of this effort will be a full analysis of one or more of the optical geometries, a manuscript published to an Optica journal for each of the geometries with the student as a co-author or first author depending upon their time and abilities, and designs that can be presented at the NAU undergraduate symposium. In addition, the results of this investigation would provide a design that can be manufactured and evaluated in laboratory investigations before being used by NAU researchers in future investigations.