Scientists and engineers who design instruments are often confronted by a lack of resources, such as, money, time, volume, power, and maximum weight allowance. Those who build instrumentation for space-based, sub-orbital, and airborne platforms are particularly sensitive to these constraints. At the Laboratory for Advanced Instrumentation Research, we work on the development of existing and original technologies that lower the resource costs of conventional observational techniques, such as polarimetry and spatially-multiplexed spectroscopy.
In this talk, I will present our efforts to develop two commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices for applications in astronomy and remote sensing. The first is a new class of imaging polarimeters based on the micropolarizer array. These polarization sensors are inexpensive, extremely stable and straightforward to use. The second is the digital micromirror device (DMD), which is currently the only alternative to microshutter arrays (MSAs) for object selection in space-based/sub-orbital multiobject spectrometers.