By Patricia Daukantas

Whoops – yesterday I forgot to note that a second OSA member is among the 23 winners of the annual “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

OSA member Nergis Mavalvala, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.A.), has done significant research at the intersection of optics, quantum physics and gravity. MacArthur Fellows receive $500,000 over five years with no strings attached.

When Mavalvala, now 42, was still a graduate student, she developed a prototype laser interferometer for detecting gravity waves. The principles of that instrument were later incorporated into the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

The MacArthur Foundation has put a brief biography and video of Mavalvala online. OPN published more information on LIGO in the May 2008 issue and the July 1995 issue.

2010-09 September, Applied optics, Astrophysics, Lasers interferometry, astrophysics, awards, women, ligo

By Patricia Daukantas

A Cornell University (U.S.A.) scientist specializing in on-chip nanophotonics devices has won a $500,000 “genius grant” fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

OSA Fellow Michal Lipson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell, is one of 23 award recipients in diverse fields ranging from astrophysics to sculpture, theater and jazz. MacArthur Fellows receive $500,000 over five years with no strings attached.

The 40-year-old Lipson received the award for “working at the intersection of fundamental photonics and nanofabrication engineering to design silicon-based photonic circuits that are paving the way for practical optical computing devices,” according to the foundation’s website. She was named an OSA Fellow in 2008 for “outstanding contributions to the field of silicon nanophotonics, including the development of high-bandwidth modulators and low-power nonlinear optical devices.”

The MacArthur Foundation has put a brief biography and video of Lipson online. I wrote about her work in the November 2006 Scatterings column (four-wave mixing within a broadband light amplifier) and also in January 2008 (a microfluidic device that used light to sort tiny particles).

2010-09 September, Applied optics, Biomedical optics, OFC/NFOEC nanotechnology, awards, OSA Fellows, women, photonics, silicon photonics

By Patricia Daukantas

A recent article in the Washington Post pointed out something that OPN readers already know: A 17th-century Danish scientist was the first person to come up with a realistic estimate of the speed of light.

I wrote about this guy, Ole Rømer, in the July/August 2009 issue of OPN. Things get busy in the magazine business, though, so it took a contributing writer in the Post to point out that Rømer died 300 years ago this week – September 19, 1710.

As the Post writer and I both noted, Rømer deduced that light had a very large, but still finite, velocity by studying the motion of the moon Io around the planet Jupiter. After he published his findings in 1676, he turned his attention to other matters, and later scientists continued to refine their measurements of light’s speed until we got the standard that we have today.

One of the challenges that I – or anyone else – have faced when writing about Rømer is that many of his letters and other papers were burned in a building fire after his death. Thus, science historians have lost some valuable primary source material that would have given us additional insight into Rømer’s reasoning and his struggles to gain acceptance of his hypothesis. Still, we know enough about this Danish astronomer to commemorate his place on the timeline of scientific understanding.

2010-09 September, Optics history optics history, light

By Patricia Daukantas

Future mapping missions to the Sun’s outer planets may generate terabytes of data that must be shipped back to Earth. A French aerospace company has proposed a new type of solar-sailing “clipper ships” to bring those data to ground-based scientists.

Joel Poncy and colleagues at Thales Alenia Space (Cannes and Toulouse, France) described the idea of interplanetary “data clippers” at this week’s meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome, Italy.

The high-resolution camera systems that could be sent to Jupiter, Saturn and their moons aboard spacecraft now in the planning stages could collect many terabytes of data. The French team estimates that a full map of Ganymede (one of Jupiter’s large moons) could take decades with today’s onboard antenna technology and the Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope planned for the Southern Hemisphere.

According to Poncy’s plan, communications satellites equipped with solar sails would fly close to a planetary orbiter, upload its data, then fly by Earth and drop off the data at one of our ground stations. Solar sails would enable the small communications craft to fly without onboard propellant. Here is an artist’s impression of the concept (interplanetary distances are obviously shorter than in real life).

The Japanese Space Agency, also known as JAXA, is currently testing a solar sail mission called IKAROS, which was launched in May.

2010-09 September, Miscellaneous Optics solar power, satellites, communications