MIT Lincoln Laboratory is currently developing optical communications technologies to support a variety of future NASA missions, including human space exploration efforts. The Artemis II mission, which will return humans to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo missions, will include an optical communication payload for the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications (O2O) demonstration.  The recently launched Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) provides an optical relay that will communicate between ground terminals and the soon to be launched Integrated LCRD Low-Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) aboard the International Space Station. This talk describes the development and status of these systems.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Air Force Contract No. FA8702-15-D-0001. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration

When presented with a new design request it is not unusual for an optical designer to start from an existing design that was chosen based on its underlying design form and then scaled to meet system requirements (e.g. focal length). However, the design of a new zoom lens is complex and typically requires a designer to “start from scratch”. As a result, considerable emphasis must be placed on the first-order configuration of the starting point design especially since constraints on packaging parameters (e.g. length, diameter, working distance) can change the first-order solution space significantly. This talk will take a historical look at the student-led development of Excel, Matlab, and Python zoom lens tools for automating the Monte Carlo first-order search, visualizing the zoom motion, and quickly evaluating the performance of a complex zoom lens.

The events of 2020 have forced us all to confront the dark truths of racial injustice and police brutality that so many black people have endured for decades. The scientific community especially had its own awakening to the bias, indifference, and discrimination that black scientists have seen and experienced, including the fact that as a whole, the many contributions that black scientists have given to science have not been embraced nor celebrated by their colleagues mainly because of their skin color. In this presentation, I share my story on how I was able to earn the Ph.D. in optics through my matriculation of entirely all historically black colleges and universities, how the black scientific community responded to the cry for racial equality, and why it is so important to advocate on their behalf for racial equity in the sciences.

Beam-steering is an important component in LiDAR and free space optical communication (FSOC) systems.  Large mechanical systems for beam-steering provide good optical performance, but are undesirable for many applications due to their size, cost, and complexity.  Two chip-based beam-steering solutions, optical phased arrays (OPA) and lens-assisted beam steering (LABS), will be discussed.  In an OPA, an array of coherent beams are combined, and the relative phase of the beams is controlled to allow steering of the net beam.  This is common technique in RADAR systems, but only recently has it become feasible in an optical system.  In a LABS system, a lens is used to create a beam, and the direction of the beam depends on the emission (or receiving) location of the light in the focal plane of the lens.