Laboratory of Space Optics Technology (LSOT) was established in 1993 and its main research field includes space-borne remote sensing, space-borne astronomical observation, space-borne machine vision, star sensor technique, novel imaging technique, advanced image processing and instrument calibration etc. LSOT covers an area of about 13400 square meters and a large optical super-clean laboratory, dozens of electronics laboratories and many different kinds of instrumentations are located within LSOT. Depending on these, fabrication, testing and experimentation of space-borne camera whose aperture is smaller than 3 meter could be carried out. With the strong support from Chinese Academy of Sciences and national level, LSOT have established highly professional innovation team and its own core competiveness in these research fields and many famous experts in Optics such as Qiuming Xue, Baochang Zhao, Yingcai Li, Bin Xiangli come from Laboratory of Space Optics Technology.
Until 2019, totally 96 staff are working in Laboratory of Space Optics Technology. Among these staff, there are 14 professors and 30 associate professors, which contain 6 supervisors for PhD candidate and 22 supervisors for master student. At present, 55 graduate students including 19 PhD candidates are doing space optics related researches in LSOT and more than 200 students have been graduated from LSOT. Most of these graduates are now working in universities, research institutes and famous enterprises. Since its establishment, LSOT have entailed many important national level projects including High-tech Program of China (863), National Natural Sciences Foundation, Program of China Manned Space, Chang’e Program and so on. By doing excellent jobs in these projects, LSOT is awarded many national awards and more than 500 papers and 150 patents are published.
In order to realize sustainable development in future, LSOT have carried out many novel researches, including on-orbit assembly based super large space-borne optical camera, adaptive/active optical device, wave-front sensing and controlling, computational imaging, sub-electron super-low read out noise electronics and advanced image processing (for example deep learning based super resolution, restoration, enhancement) and so on. All these researches will pave the way for LSOT to entail more national level projects in future. At the meantime, LSOT pays specially attention to communications and collaborations with other universities and research institutes. At present, three joint research centers have been established based on LSOT, containing joint research center of space-borne star sensing technology, joint innovation center for space-borne information retrieval and laboratory of machine vision for space-borne application.