Graduate Research Assistant Jared Termini is a recipient of a 2022 NASA Graduate Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities (NSTGRO) award. 

This award starts in September and will provide support for his dissertation work for the next four years. Jared's proposed research for the NSTGRO “Evaluating the Performance of Cutting-Edge UV Gratings for NASA's Next Generation Space Telescopes” compliments Keri Hoadley's APRA grant, developing UV gratings at MATFab with Casey DeRoo and Cecilia Fasano, NASA FINESST fellow.

As part of APRA grant, cutting-edge manufacturing technology/techniques will be used to create high-resolution ultraviolet (UV) optics (gratings) for next-generation space instruments. Termini's NSTGRO program will expand upon our work under Dr. Hoadley’s APRA by determining how strongly the performance of these gratings correlates with the gratings’ surface qualities. These findings will reduce mission risk, schedule, and testing impact for future UV missions.

Evaluating the UV efficiency of large-format gratings is an expensive and time-consuming task, as doing so requires large, specialized vacuum facilities. However, measuring a grating’s surface characteristics via metrology and optical methods is quicker and less costly. Therefore, finding a correlation between a grating’s surface qualities and its UV performance will guide researchers in predicting the UV performance of future, large-format EBL gratings using metrology and optical methods without needing to measure each grating at UV wavelengths.