Outstanding Questions:

• evaluate the total cost for our designs (doublet + hastings)
• comment on feasibility of relay w/ magnification
• How large of a magnification can we obtain, and in what total track length? E.g. 3X magnification with f_obj = 50mm is good enough, but would like to improve on both.

Jan 31, 2025: Rough Plan for Future

UTAT SS is pursuing a design which may not necessarily be optimal and/ or viable from an optical perspective, given the technical debt and sunk cost from mechanical and other subsystems.

• I.e., it is too much to ask the whole team to change their mechanical layout and PCB shape at this point, even though it can be done and it would yield the necessary volume / TOTR for the payload.
• Besides, there is an unreasonable 4kg mass limit the team is stuck with due to depositing money with a launch provider. This gives the optical system less than 500g of mass and 300g for the optomechanical housing, which is simply unworkable without making unpleasant sacrifices to performance specifications.

Therefore, Optics will develop designs independently of the rest of the team, while still taking inspiration from the real-life constraints faced by the FINCH satellite. There are other learning opportunities to be had outside of the FINCH satellite, these include:

• making a hand-held hyperspectral imager that could be, e.g., attached onto a drone, or used in the laboratory for measurements.
• publishing optical design work separately from UTAT SS. There are a number of appropriate venues, such as SmallSat (Europe, USA), and SPIE, etc.
  • SPIE Optics + Photonics, session: “Imaging Spectrometry”
  • SPIE Photonics West, session: “Free-Space and Micro-Optical Imaging Systems”
  • IEEE International Conference on Space Optical Systems and Applications (ICSOS)
  • Optica Imaging Congress, session: “Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging”

The goal right now is to prepare for the SmallSat Europe 2025 conference. The deadline for paper submission is April 15, 2025. The conference itself is May 27-28 2025. I would like to accomplish the following for that conference:

• create my own optical design, eval + optimize, tolerance, quote. Kepler telescope + folded light path, commercial SWIR objective + FLIR TAU.
• Volume allocation, mass, volume / mass budget. Thermal fluctuations (assume stuff, find in literature). Make volume model.
• Next, make lens housings. No SolidWorks, just in ZEMAX. SolidWorks / Ansys mechanical has advantage of good for mechanical FEA which is far beyond the scope of what I want to do. Do thermal analysis, and then stray light analysis if possible.
  • stray light requires modelling GRISM in NSQ mode.
• Other stuff, beyond ZEMAX:
  • Radiation considerations: window? material choices
  • Radiometry / SNR considerations: signal budget.
  • A little bit about the science that is possible with this application.
• Spatial / Spectral testing considerations.