Daniel Meschke

Activities

Optics is a fascinating and multifaceted field and working as an Optics engineer consists of several activities which include

Alignment of opto-mechanical sub-assemblies
Optical and mechanical design of optical test setups and lab tools
Conducting verification and acceptance tests

About me

I am currently working as a Development Engineer Optics for a laboratory equipment manufacturer in Switzerland. My main tasks are verification of components and systems for NIR spectroscopy instruments, as well as designing, specifying and testing optics for these instruments. I previously worked in the space industry in Switzerland and in an Astronomy research institute in Germany as an AIT engineer (Alignment, Integration and Testing), where I was responsible for the integration and alignment of opto-mechanical assemblies for satellite instruments and designing lab tools for tests and verification campaigns. Some of these parts are shown in the Gallery and here.

This picture shows an image de-rotator (K-Mirror) mounted on LINC's optical bench. It's not easy to see, but the complete optical bench is inclined at an angle of about 45 degrees relative to the ground to measure the flexure of the mirror's structure.
This is the lab setup to test one of the two High layer Wavefront Sensors for LINC-NIRVANA. LN-MAPS is used as a light source in this configuration. The de-rotator is missing in the current setup.
Sometimes it's necessary to travel a bit... Here we are in Wales for an optical testing course.

Previous projects:

GRAVITY: 2nd generation VLTI instrument
LBT IRTC: Infrared Test Camera for LBT AO secondary and gregorian focus commissioning
LINC-NIRVANA: German-Italian High Resolution Imager for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT)
BELA: BepiColombo Laser Altimeter
CaSSIS Telescope: Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System for ExoMars TGO

CAD gallery

The gallery shows some of the devices and assemblies I used during previous projects. Unfortunately these pictures are already quite old, because due to intellectual property issues I cannot show picture from my work for privately owned companies. So, I leave these pictures here to give a general impression about what I did (and also a bit for nostalgia ;-)).

The design for the examples shown above have been done during my previous job at the MPIA in Heidelberg. The CAD software utilized for this was Pro/Engineer (today known as PTC Creo) and Zemax (Ansys Zemax OpticStudio).

Publications, presentations

To view the list of publications and presentations, please click the button below.

Private fun projects

To view the private projects, please click below.