The Optical Society (OSA) has awarded the Guide Star Alliance of TOPTICA and MPBC with the 2017 Paul F. Forman Team Engineering Excellence Award. We received the award on Sept. 18, 2017 during “Frontiers in Optics (FiO) + Laser Science (LS)” in Washington DC (USA). TOPTICA Photonics CEO Wilhelm Kaenders together with Wallace Clements and Daoping Wei from MPBC accepted the award on behalf of the team.
Under contract of and in close collaboration with the European Southern Observatory (ESO), industrial partners, TOPTICA Photonics and MPB Communications (MPBC), had joined together to develop the high-power CW tunable guide star laser system SodiumStar. This development is now considered the quasi-standard for existing and planned telescopes around the world.
“I have been highly impressed by the outstanding professionalism and expertise of the TOPTICA/MPBC team,” said Corinne Boyer, adaptive optics group leader of the “Thirty Meter Telescope” (USA). “The result is a ‘first class’ sodium laser now available for the entire adaptive optics community.”
Maxime Boccas, head of maintenance, support and engineering at the European Southern Observatory (Chile), described the laser as being “the greatest achievement in astronomic instrumentation of the last ten years.”
