Paper 13100-125
Paper 13100-125
Development of the WindCube Fabry-Perot Etalon
On demand | Presented live 19 June 2024 
Abstract
WindCube is a NASA HFORT funded mission to study the coupling of thermospheric winds with the earth’s ionosphere. The optical system is based on a limb sensing Fabry-Perot etalon designed to measure the Doppler shift of the 630 nm oxygen airglow emission. The instrument payload is designed to fit within a 6U volume in a 12U CubeSat. The accuracy requirement for the wind speed retrieval is 5 m/s. This is the driving requirement for the opto-mechanical stability of the etalon system. Active temperature control of the etalon is employed to keep the mounted etalon within a +/- 0.1 C range. This paper discusses the design and analysis of the mounted etalon system to meet the accuracy requirement as well as surviving the rigors of vibration testing and the launch environment.
Presenter
National Ctr. for Atmospheric Research (United States)
Patrick Zmarzly is an Instrument Engineer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) High Altitude Observatory (HAO). He has been with NCAR-HAO since 2019. He works in several areas of instrument development at HAO including optical and opto-mechanical design and analysis, stray light engineering and control and instrument performance modeling. He has extensive experience in the areas of design, analysis, manufacturing, assembly, optical alignment, integration, testing and metrology. He is currently serving as the Optical Systems Lead for the WindCube project. He is also supporting design of the COSMO Large Coronagraph and multiple other instrument development efforts.
Prior to joining HAO Patrick spent several years developing airborne instrumentation for cloud microphysics and atmospheric research as well as developing beam director systems for High Energy Lasers. He received his BSME from Bradley University and his MSME from the University of Colorado Boulder.
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