Plenary Speakers
Dr. Paul M. Danehy
NASA Langley Research Center
Moon to Mars: Contributions of Optical Measurements to NASA’s Artemis Program
NASA and partners have embarked on a series of space missions to the moon and Mars, collectively known as the Artemis Program. This talk overviews the Artemis missions and details laser and optical measurement technique development and application to ground and flight tests related to, or inspired by, the Artemis program. Three measurement techniques have been applied to study vehicle launch, Earth and Mars entry, and lunar and Martian landing. Such optical instrumentation provides unique information to inform the underlying physics of space flight while also providing benchmark data for validating ever advancing predictive codes.
About the Speaker
Dr. Danehy graduated from the University of New Hampshire in Mechanical Engineering in 1989. He attended Stanford University obtaining both MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering, finishing in 1995. Thereafter, he spent five years at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra as a post-doctoral researcher and then as a faculty member in the Department of Physics, where he applied laser-based methods to study hypersonic flows. Dr. Danehy has been at NASA Langley Research Center since 2000. As NASA’s Senior Technologist (ST) for Advanced Measurement Systems he leads and participates in the planning, advocacy, execution and review of basic and applied research to advance the state of the art in measurement technology with an emphasis on Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL).
Dr. Nathalie Picqué
Max-Born Institute, GERMANY
Frequency comb sensing and imaging
Optical frequency combs have revolutionized time and frequency metrology and enabled powerful techniques such as dual-comb interferometry. Using two combs with slightly different line-spacings, these motion-free interferometers achieve exceptional accuracy, speed and resolution, enabling compact integrated devices and advanced applications in spectroscopy, sensing and imaging.
About the Speaker
Nathalie Picqué is Director at the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy and Professor of Physics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Previously, she was a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany) and before that a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Orsay (France). She received her doctoral degree in physics from the University Paris-Saclay (France) in 1998. She and her team explore new insights in optical and molecular fundamental physics with advancing tools of laser science. Nathalie Picqué is a pioneer in the development and application of techniques of interferometry over broad spectral bandwidths with optical frequency combs. An Optica Fellow, N. Picqué is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2024 William F. Meggers Award of Optica.
