Extremely Thin Mirror Glass

Presently the polishing cost of telescope mirrors is about $400,000 USD per meter squared ($400K/m2) using conventional abrasive polishing technologies. We know from decades of building ground-based telescopes that their cost, including the tracking system and optical payload, scales approximately linearly with the moving mass of the system and its light-collecting area. The larger the mirror the larger the cost. 

With additive (3D printing) technologies we can create an active structure on smooth fire-polished window glass that creates “stiffness” with software with considerably less mass than the glass-steel backing structure of, e.g., Keck-era mirror segments [11]. Current glass technologies allow patent-pending “live-mirrors” (Fig. 3) to be as large as 8m in size with an area-mass-density that approaches 1/10th of traditional large telescope mirrors. 

We propose to develop a new and interdisciplinary technology for creating extremely lightweight diffraction-limited meta-material-based optical systems with exceptional optical quality spectacularly lower cost and production time.

The novelty is to replace classical rigid and heavy optical mirrors with “live” and light dynamic optoelectronic systems consisting of a thin optical fire-polished glass sheet actively “live” supported by many-degree-of-freedom force-actuators/sensors integrated and miniaturized via additive manufacturing and 3D printing.