Sep 26, 2008 - Claremont, Calif. - Surrounded by some of the world’s top astronomical and optical scientists and engineers, HMC’s 2007-08 Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Clinic team presented a paper and poster at the Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) conference in Marseille, France, in July.

The team—made up of Alan Kraut ’08, Kevin Swartzlander ’08, Elton Wong ’08, Graham Orr ’09, foreign-exchange student Yusuke Nakaya and faculty advisor Patrick Little—was commissioned by SwRI to conduct studies on the feasibility of using a 2-meter balloon-borne telescope to continuously monitor the planet Venus.

“If we can fly a balloon to 120,000 feet with a 2-meter telescope, we will probably be able to produce astronomical images that are as good as the Hubble Space Telescope, at one percent of the cost,” said HMC alumnus Mark Bullock ’78, who served as the Clinic project liaison with his SwRI associate Eliot Young.

The team’s main task was to design, implement and test a system capable of correcting for the motions similar to those in the upper atmosphere that can lead to massive blurring in imaging systems like telescopes.

“In practice, a balloon-borne telescope would locate the object it wishes to observe and find a star that is very close to the target,” explained Orr, an engineering major whose high school French made all the difference in getting around Marseille. “Optically, the portion of the telescope’s image that contains the guide star is split off the focal plane and directed at an electronic sensor. This sensor provides a correcting signal to redirect a fast steering mirror to recenter the image.”

So, in the lab, the Clinic team created an artificial star field and introduced vibrations into a smaller telescope that their system would then try to correct.

“The reason we used the smaller telescope was actually a bit of a trick,” Orr noted. “If you put a light-source through the eye-piece, the light will come out through the big end of the telescope in faint parallel beams, exactly like starlight. This allowed us to test our control system on two optical tables 10 feet apart rather than on an object very far away. We were also able to introduce motions into the smaller (star field) telescope for testing.”

The results of their work, presented in poster form at SPIE—an international society advancing an interdisciplinary approach to the science and application of light—was an optical tracking system that can cancel out unwanted motions when trying to take images of celestial objects.

“We presented our poster amongst brilliant astronomical research-related projects, which was very exciting,” said Orr, who hopes to work in an area of science that will enable the human species to survive and prosper on multiple planets in the future. “Needless to say, our liaisons were thrilled that we came to the conference and that everyone got a publication out of it.”

“I have to say, even being from Harvey Mudd myself, the project exceeded my expectations,” added Bullock, who studied theoretical physics while a student at HMC. “It was great to see what engineering students at Mudd are capable of.”