Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, December 17, 2012 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
John Wood
"Beryllium Receiver Telescopes for Space Lidar"
ABSTRACT -- Starting with the IRIS telescopes for Voyager in the 1960's, beryllium telescopes have been used in numerous space investigations. Properties such as their stiffness, low mass and good thermal performance has continued to make them attractive for space applications today such as the ATLAS telescope for ICESat-2 and the CATS telescope for the International Space Station.
IRIS, MOLA, GLAS, CALIPSO, LITE, LOLA, MLA, ATLAS and CATS will be discussed in detail and several others will be outlined. Methods for correcting the co-alignment of the outgoing laser beam to the incoming receiver Field of View will be also discussed. Beryllium was selected for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) because of its near zero Coefficient of Thermal Expansion performance at cryogenic temperatures. However, JWST will not be discussed here.
SPEAKER -- Dr. H. John Wood is an astronomer and served as an optical engineer for the Optics Branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He retired at the end of July 2012 after 25 years working for NASA. Since June 1990, he was Optics Lead Engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Project. He led the team that successfully determined the optical prescription of HST while on orbit. He then led NASA's effort to develop and test the corrective optics for HST. Later, he served as Science Liaison in the Instrument Synthesis & Analysis Laboratory for new Earth Science and Space Science instrument engineering design at Goddard. He participated in 114 concept studies over eight years in the lab. His final assignment was as optics engineer for the ATLAS project, a lidar altimeter aboard ICESat-2, to measure the ice on both poles of the Earth.
A graduate of Swarthmore College, Dr. Wood earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in Astronomy from Indiana University. In addition to the Hubble Project, he was Lead Optical Engineer on other Goddard projects: the Mars Observer Laser Altimeter and the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment aboard the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). Earlier he served as assistant to the director at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (Chile) for two years. He held a Fulbright Research Fellowship for two years at the University Observatory in Vienna, Austria. He also served five years as a staff astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. His career began with six years on the astronomy faculty of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.
Winner of the 1992 NASA exceptional service medal and the 1994 NASA exceptional achievement medal for his work on COBE and HST, he is the author of more than 50 research papers in astronomy and space optics. He received the 2009 NASA Medal for exceptional service in outreach on the HST project. He was also awarded the 2009 Robert H. Goddard award of Merit for exceptional achievement in his career at Goddard.