Interviewed by Rich Donnelly, SPIE Richard Hoover has worked in space science for most of his career. In 1996, he moved away from his seminal work in x-ray telescopes to focus on astrobiology and the study of terrestrial organisms in extreme environments. In this interview, he chats about his photonics passions. Can you talk about astrobiology and why you find it so exciting. That's a very interesting question.
Diatoms are also critically important to optics in an interesting way.
The apochromat offered the potential of being far superior in quality to previously available achromatic objectives. This Zeiss Apochromat was the first microscope objective ever produced that was capable of resolving the minute pores in the shell of this diatom. This feat had never before been accomplished by any microscope objective and the original photographic plate recording this historic moment still resides in the Van Heurck Museum in Antwerp. The Zeiss Apochromat was placed on the market in 1886 and the Apo remains the premier objective for visible light microscopy. I was at the SPIE Annual meeting in Denver in 1996 when David McKay announced to the world the discovery of possible microfossils in the Mars meteorite.