In early February, Kerri Cahoy packed up her family and caravanned with students from her lab, driving eight hours south of Boston to Wallops Island, Virginia. There, the group watched a backpack-sized spacecraft launch into space aboard an Antares rocket. Inside the small probe, named DeMi, was a deformable mirror payload that Cahoy and her students designed, along with a miniature telescope and laser test source. DeMi’s mirror corrects the positioning of either the test laser or a star seen by the telescope. On future missions, these mirrors could be…
