ROCKY MOUNTAIN SECTION OPTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA & IEEE LASERS AND ELECTROOPTICS SOCIETY May Meeting & Pizza Party Date: Thursday, 15 May 2003 Time: 6:30 PM pizza, 7:30 PM talk Place: National Center for Atmospheric Research Mesa Lab Main Seminar Room 1850 Table Mesa, Boulder Title: Deep Impact 'Blast a Comet With a Copper Boule' Mission Jim Baer Ball Aerospace Boulder, CO Abstract: Deep Impact is NASA's Discovery class mission to Comet Temple 1. The probe will separate into two spacecraft, one of which will impact the surface and excavate a large crater. Optical observations will allow the mission to determine much about the composition and structure of the comet nucleus, of which very little is known, in addition to helping the craft navigate to the target. Jim will discuss the mission, its goals and hardware, with emphasis on the optical instruments and the challenges of designing passive cryogenic optics for deep space operation while staying within tighter cost constraints than have been the norm for space missions. Biography: Jim Baer received his Bachelors degree in Physics from Worchester Polytechnic Institute, and his Masters in Optical Engineering from the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics in 1978. He worked in solid state lasers, primarily resonant pumped rare earth doped crystal lasers for inertial confinement fusion applications at Sanders Assoc., and on optical storage at Storage Technology Corp. and a small start-up. For the past 17 years he has worked at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, on defense and NASA applications. His projects have included the Relay Mirror Experiment retroreflector array, the spectrometer for the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III, the high precision star tracker for the Chandra X-Ray Astrophysical Facility, an Ocean Color Instrument imaging spectrometer for NPOESS, the telescopes and spectrometer for NASA's Deep Impact mission to Comet Temple I, and the visible and NIR imager for the New Horizons mission to Pluto. He has been granted eleven patents, and has published ten articles, most recently on testing of optics under cryogenic conditions.