The 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering

摘要

Over the last four hundred years, since Galileo first used a small refractive telescope to study the Cosmos, the development of observational astronomy has been a technology-driven field as astronomers have constantly struggled to build ever-larger telescopes. The fundamental limit to the power of a telescope has always been the aperture, or collecting area of the primary optic, initially a refracting lens, which today is the primary mirror. The drive to build ever-larger telescopes is motivated by the need to collect as much light as possible and, thereby, increase the signal-to-noise (SIN) ratio of observations. In addition, a larger ground based telescope with adaptive optics has increasingly better angular resolution as the diameter of the primary mirror increases.