Reconfigurable Metasurface Optics Enabling Space Image Sensing

Reconfigurable optical metasurfaces are rapidly emerging as a major frontier in photonics research, development, and applications. They promise compact, lightweight, and energy-efficient reconfigurable optical systems with unprecedented performance and functions that can be dynamically defined on-demand. Space applications represent an emerging area in which these characteristics are highly prized. Among the potential candidates for reconfigurable optics, chalcogenide-based phase change materials (PCMs) offer great promise due to their non-volatile and analogue switching characteristics. The ability to dynamically tune optical functions through selective modulation of electromagnetic waves is crucial to the advancement of a variety of sensing applications, from imaging spectrometers to light detection and ranging (LiDAR).<br/>This presentation introduces a reconfigurable metasurface optic project led by a research team at NASA Langley Research Center since 2018. It covers advances in PCM-based metafilters, performance data on reliability enhancements, image sensing system architectures, and mission concepts enabled through these advances.<br/><br/>The talk especially highlights two Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE) missions, MISSE-14 (completed in 2022) and MISSE-21 (launch scheduled in 2025). PCM samples are flown on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS) to expose materials to the extreme conditions of the low Earth orbit (LEO) environment. Through the MISSE-14 exposure campaign entitled “Tunable mid-wave infrared (MWIR) filters based on exotic PCMs”, the team gained experience with LEO exposure of PCMs The results showed the space survivability of candidate PCMs on the ISS (https://spaceborne-pcms.github.io/). The PCM-based metafilters to be exposed and tested for the MISSE-21 mission are based on the experimental and theoretical results of the MISSE-14 data. The metafilter will be an essential piece of the NASA Artemis mission by providing accurate scientific images of the Space Launch System through an enhanced imaging spectrometer. Other NASA applications of the filter technology include the CLICK (CubeSat Laser Infrared CrosslinK), LCOT (Low-Cost Optical Terminal), and FSOS (Free-Space Optical Subsystem) projects.