Robert A. Woodruff (born September 1943) is an American physicist who is known principally for having designed and worked on a wide variety of instruments for space telescopes.
Woodruff has over 45 years experience designing optical systems for United States space program missions.
[2] He has made significant contributions to projects ranging from Skylab, Nimbus, Apollo–Soyuz, Galileo, SIRTF/Spitzer, microgravity science, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), Beyond Einstein, Exo-planet detection, Kepler, as well as others.
Among his accomplishments, two activities standout: 1) 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.
[2] In 2012, Woodruff was the Ernest Fox Nichols Distinguished Lecturer at Kansas State University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1964.