The Adaptive Optics Revolution: A History

Conclusion

339 Conclusion From the late 1960s to the present, the United States Air Force has played a leading role in the development of the revolutionary technology of adaptive optics. The Air Force laboratory system served as the focal point for pioneering research energized by the brainpower and persistence of an extremely competent team of military and civil service scientists. This distinguished group—working in obscurity for large portions of their careers because of classification restrictions—successfully advanced adaptive optics technology while assigned to a number of Air Force organizations throughout the country. Heading the list performing this groundbreaking work over the last four decades was the Air Force Research Laboratory and its predecessor organizations: Phillips Laboratory, the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, Rome Laboratory, and Rome Air Development Center. Two civilian components that made major contributions to this Air Force team were the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, one of several Department of Defense Federally Funded Research and Development Centers chartered to assist the government in strategic scientific planning and research. And finally, in the 1980s, with more and more of the nation’s defense policy emphasis shifting to space, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization became another important member of the adaptive optics team. People in these organizations had a grand vision and made a difference . Although there was no one person who single-handedly invented | 340 and advanced adaptive optics, the Air Force’s scientific cadre were out in front of the pack, solving enormously complex problems relating to the development of sophisticated optics and beam control systems, laser guide stars, wavefront sensors, high-speed processors, deformable mirrors, lasers with good beam quality, and much more, in order to remove the distorting effects of atmospheric turbulence on light waves. Their scientific contributions have had a profound effect on current and future Air Force missions, and many of their findings have also benefited the astronomy community. It is not an exaggeration to label this group of military and government scientists, armed with imagination and daring, as trailblazers and pioneers. They possessed a firm belief that they could get the job done in spite of the odds that they faced, and devised real-world atmospheric compensation techniques and new hardware leading to the production of high-resolution images of space objects, as well as compensated laser beams propagating through the atmosphere. What drove the Air Force’s commitment to adaptive optics was the overriding concern to meet its space object identification mission by generating the best possible images. Senior military strategists viewed space as the battleground of the future, and they envisioned collection of high-resolution images as the cornerstone of the Air Force’s space situational awareness mission. In addition, in preparation for potential future antisatellite missions, the Air Force wanted to be ready to strengthen its space control mission of offensive and counter-space operations. Both tasks depended upon advancing adaptive optics—a critical component of any future airborne or ground-based laser weapon system. It was in the best interest of DoD to initiate research and development programs designed to better understand atmospheric turbulence and how it affected light waves, and then to build adaptive optics systems that were capable of compensating for distortions in light to perform decisive imaging and beam propagation missions vital to the nation’s defense. The Department of Defense had designated the Air Force to develop and integrate adaptive optics technology into an operational system. The Air Force received unfailing support from the Department of Defense and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which sustained a heavy financial investment in the development of adaptive optics. That steady flow of money was one reason for the success of the adaptive optics research Conclusion 341 program. Funding not only paid for the salaries of scientists and theoretical and experimental programs, it also built the military’s largest telescopes and optical support facilities at Starfire Optical Range in New Mexico and the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Site in Hawaii. These modern observatory sites directly contributed to the success of the Air Force adaptive optics program. Without these large telescopes, the pace of adaptive optics research would have been greatly diminished.1 Money had a powerful effect and partially explained why government scientists were ahead of university researchers on adaptive optics. Sufficient funding allowed research programs to flourish from one year to the next. That...