Whether you surrendered control of your TV to "The Outer Limits" or voyaged to the final frontier with "Star Trek," space has held a vivid grip on our imaginations—and spectroscopy has been along for the ride. A decade after these television shows first aired in the mid-1960s, Voyager 1 was launched with infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers on board. Thirty-five years later the UV spectrometer is still functioning as the spacecraft heads out beyond the solar system.
As senior editor Gail Overton writes in our cover story, such planetary and deep-space applications of spectroscopy have demanded rugged designs to survive the environment and capture the data. The resulting spectrometers have been delivering invaluable information that ranges from the makeup of heavenly bodies to the performance of optical materials, sensors, and electronics in space (see page 36).
Highly scalable
Photonics has also been exploring the microcosm and three articles in the issue illustrate the technologies available to explorers at this end of the scale. Aydogan Ozcan and his colleagues at UCLA describe their work to develop a lens-free, on-chip microscope that should find many uses in field applications (see page 59). Christopher Cotton at ASE Optics shows how creative thinking about optical system design can improve the capture of fluorescence light in a commercial microscopy system used for microbiology testing at pharmaceutical manufacturing (see page 47). And contributing editor Jeff Hecht writes about developments now leading to digital holographic microscopes that can display 3D images of living cells in real time (see page 53).
Whatever the scale, photonics clearly continues to enhance existing applications while enabling new ones.
