Michigan Aerospace Corporation developed an aircraft-qualified, triple-aperture, piezoelectrically-tunable
Fabry-Perot etalon under contract with NASA-Goddard. This etalon, shown on the left below, is an integral part of the TWiLiTE
(Tropospheric Wind LIDAR Technology Experiment). Under this program, MAC modified its existing space-qualified tunable etalon
design to create a robust, tunable Fabry-Perot etalon that is capable of operation aboard an aircraft in flight. The three
apertures consist of three gaps using a single etalon which enable three independent measurements to be taken simultaneously.
The system operates in the ultraviolet at 355nm. This effort involved detailed finite element analysis of the etalon structure
and recommendations for vibration isolation. Delivery of the fully-qualified etalon to NASA-Goddard was in April 2007, with
initial successful flights aboard a NASA WB-57 in 2009.
TWiLiTe Etalon |
Fringe pattern produced by the three different gaps in the etalon |
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