Peter Cheimets

Mr. Cheimets has >20 years experience designing, developing, and deploying spacebased telescopes. These include several highly successful solar telescopes ranging from the ground breaking Transitional Region and Coronal Explorer Small Explorer. Known as TRACE, it demonstrated the power of multilayer coatings to enable extreme ultraviolet observation. It operated for 13 years before being replaced by the Solar Dynamics Observatory instrument: the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly. Mr Cheimets was also responsible for the four telescopes in this instrument know as AIA.

In addition he has led the development of the X-ray telescope on the Japanese Hinode mission, and the telescope on the UV spectrometer IRIS, recently featured in Science magazine and the New York Times.

At the moment he is leading the development of a infrared spectrometer to view next month’s eclipse, and a rocket based x-ray spectrometer experiment to view the sun.

Mr. Cheimets received his BS from MIT in Mechanical Engineering, followed by an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University concentrated on Mechanical Dynamics and Control. More recently he received a management degree from Tufts University. He has worked in the paper industry, development advanced energy conversion systems for United Technologies as well as several small start ups, and developed medical diagnostic equipment for Corning Medical, before taking his present position with the Smithsonian.