Geoff Anderson, AFOSR Program Officer | Space Technology

Photon Sieve Rainbow: Photon sieves are flat elements consisting of billions of tiny holes of particular size arranged in concentric circles in an otherwise opaque element. Narrowband light passing through these holes is diffracted to a sharp focus, so this results in a simply fabricated, low mass, high quality lens. We were investigating the suitability of this technology for large unfurlable polymer lenses in the USAF Academy FalconSat-7 mission. Here we illuminated our lens with white light to produce a spectrum of diffracted colors and orders