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The availability and performance of laser-based adaptive optics (AO) systems are strongly dependent on the power and quality of the laser beam before being projected to the sky. Frequent and time-consuming alignment procedures are usually…

Optics for future X-ray telescopes will be characterized by very large aperture and focal length, and will be made of lightweight materials like glass or silicon in order to keep the total mass within acceptable limits. Optical modules…

Astronomical telescopes suffer from a tradeoff between field of view (FoV) and image resolution: increasing the FoV leads to an optical field that is under-sampled by the science camera. This work presents a novel computational imaging…

The surface of a spinning liquid takes the shape of a paraboloid that can be used as a reflecting mirror. This very old and nearly forgotten concept has recently been revived and I review its present status. Extensive interferometric tests…

Fully reconfigurable metasurfaces would enable new classes of optical devices that provide unprecedented control of electromagnetic beamforms. The principal challenge for achieving reconfigurability is the need to generate large tunability…

The utilization of a 6.5m monolithic primary mirror in a compact three-mirror anastigmat (TMA) telescope design offers unprecedented capabilities to accommodate various next generation science instruments. This design enables the rapid and…

All-dielectric optical metasurfaces can locally control the amplitude and phase of light at the nanoscale, enabling arbitrary wavefront shaping. However, lack of post-fabrication tunability has limited the true potential of metasurfaces for…

Active optics techniques in astronomy provide high imaging quality. This paper is dedicated to highly deformable active optics that can generate non-axisymmetric aspheric surfaces-or freeform surfaces-by use of a minimum number of…

Active reflector is one of the key technologies for constructing large telescopes, especially for the millimeter/sub-millimeter radio telescopes. This article introduces a new efficient laser angle metrology system for the active reflector…

The volume available on small satellites restricts the size of optical apertures to a few centimetres, limiting the Ground-Sampling Distance (GSD) in the visible to typically 3 m at 500 km. We present in this paper the latest development of…

Optically resonant particles are key building blocks of many nanophotonic devices such as optical antennas and metasurfaces. Because the functionalities of such devices are largely determined by the optical properties of individual…

We developed a scan mirror mechanism (SMM) that enable a slit-based spectrometer or spectropolarimeter to precisely and quickly map an astronomical object. The SMM, designed to be installed in the optical path preceding the entrance slit,…

A Deformable Mirror (DM) is an important component of an Adaptive Optics system. It is known that an on-axis spherical/parabolic optical component, placed at an angle to the incident beam introduces defocus as well as astigmatism in the…

Directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets (``exoEarths'') with a coronagraph instrument on a space telescope requires a stable wavefront with optical path differences limited to tens of picometers RMS during exposure times of a few hours.…

We performed closed-loop lab testing of large-format deformable mirrors (DMs) with hybrid variable reluctance actuators. TNO has been developing the hybrid variable reluctance actuators in support for a new generation of adaptive secondary…

Optomechanical systems have been attracting intensive attention in various physical experiments. With an optomechanical system, the displacement of or the force acting on a mechanical oscillator can be precisely measured by utilizing…

Tunable metasurfaces enable active and on-demand control over optical wavefronts through reconfigurable scattering of resonant nanostructures. Here, we present novel insights inspired by mechanical metamaterials to achieve giant tunability…

Many adaptive optics systems operate by measuring the distortion of the wavefront in one wavelength range and performing the scientific observations in a second, different wavelength range. One common technique is to measure wavefront…

This paper demonstrates a cryogenic deformable mirror (DM) with 1,020 actuators based on micro-electrical mechanical systems (MEMS) technology. Cryogenic space-borne infrared telescopes can experience a wavefront error due to a figure error…

Reconstructing the three-dimensional (3D) geometry of object surfaces is essential for robot perception, yet vision-based approaches are generally unreliable under low illumination or occlusion. This limitation motivates the design of a…