Robert A. Woodruff


Robert A. Woodruff is an American physicist who is known principally for having designed and worked on a wide variety of instruments for space telescopes. These include Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz
, Galileo, SIRTF and MIPS, and Hubble Space Telescope instruments ; JWST, Kepler, TPF, and Destiny. He has had one or more instruments flying continuously in space since the early 1970s.
Woodruff has over 45 years experience designing optical systems for United States space program missions. He has made significant contributions to projects ranging from Skylab, Nimbus, Apollo-Soyuz, Galileo, SIRTF/Spitzer, microgravity science, the Hubble Space Telescope, and Next Generation Space Telescope, Terrestrial Planet Finder He helped fix the Hubble Space Telescope spherical aberration flaw and 2) He conceived and generated the optical concept and design for the Kepler mission. He is the author or co-author of well over 25 published or presented papers. He is also an Associate of Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy of the University of Colorado in Boulder, CO. He retired from Lockheed Martin as a Technical Fellow and Chief Scientist for Optical Systems.
In 2012, Woodruff was the Ernest Fox Nichols Distinguished Lecturer at Kansas State University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1964. He also has a master's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
PATENTS
• U.S. Patent # 5,898,529 dated April 27, 1999. “Deployable Space-sed Telescope”
• U.S. Patent # 5,420,681 dated May 30, 1995. “Modular Multiple Spectral Imager & Spectral Imager”.
• U.S. Patent # 4,391,525 dated July 5, 1983. “Interferometer”. A Michelson Interferometer that is unchirped and inherently insensitive to mechanical perturbations.

Works