About These Blogs: The JPL Science & Technology Blogs are a way for our researchers and technical staff to give first-hand accounts of the activities that are going on at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A cross-section of our staff contribute posts about the tasks they are currently involved in for NASA and JPL. These blog posts are meant to discuss technical topics. Selected comments that are on-topic are published and are moderated.
We've been developing a design for a deep-space optical transceiver for flight in the second half of the next decade. We're concentrating on an off-axis Gregorian fore-telescope, primarily for reduced optical scattering characteristics. Such a design eliminates the problems associated with the obscuration of the telescope pupil associated with an central obscuring secondary mirror.
For most telescope systems, an on-axis secondary is not much of a problem: it only obscures about 10% or less ...
It's 1:56 AM. We've been going since 8:00 AM - I guess technically that's yesterday now. In just under an hour, the Japanese OICETS optical communications satellite will rise above the horizon, and our 1-meter optical communications research telescope (OCTL) will slew across the sky to point at the satellite. It will then track the satellite as it rises and passes overhead. Once the satellite rises above the local tree line (about 20 degrees in elevation) we'll turn on our laser beacon, which ...
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