Prof. Hyun Jung Kim (Payload Sensors & Space Testing Lab) gave an invited talk at the 2024 MRS Fall Meeting (2024. 12. 06). The talk title was “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). Another Space applications of the technology include the CLICK (CubeSat Laser Infrared CrosslinK), LCOT (Low-Cost Optical Terminal), and FSOS (Free-Space Optical Subsystem) projects.

   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/).