In this episode, I sat down with Heejoo Choi. Heejoo recently won the Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award He won the award for an innovative UV cross-dispersion space telescope and engineering of a laser-truss LBT metrology system. He is currently an assistant research professor at the James C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences and an Optical Scientist at the Large Binocular Telescope.

Heejoo discusses the motivations for why innovative designs were required in the LBT metrology system as well as the Hyperion cross-dispersion space telescope. He goes into what drove the design choices and how that impacted the system performance overall. These are both cutting-edge optical designs so I am sure the audience will have a lot to explore in both.

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Youtube video version here.

Resources:

1. Andrew Rakich, Heejoo Choi, Christian Veillet, John M. Hill, Matthieu Bec, Yang Zhang, Trenton Brendel, Breann Sitarski, Michael Gardiner, Dae Wook Kim, Stephanie Rodriguez, "A laser-truss based optical alignment system on LBT," Proc. SPIE 11445, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes VIII, 114450R (13 December 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2558013

2. Heejoo Choi, Isaac L. Trumper, Yi-Ting Feng, Hyukmo Kang, Joel Berkson, Haeun Chung, Erika T. Hamden, Dae Wook Kim, "Long-slit cross-dispersion spectroscopy for Hyperion UV space telescope," J. Astron. Telesc. Instrum. Syst. 7(1) 014006 (12 March 2021) https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.7.1.014006

Link to read paper ungated

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Heejoo Choi on Innovative Optical Designs

The Spotlight Report