Grinding glass or building mirrors made of gold or beryllium is labor-intensive and expensive to the max. It takes years to fabricate these lenses and are limited in size, especially if you want the tech to reside in space like the Webb but there's a way out when gravity's taken out of the picture.
The Hubble space telescope has a primary mirror of 2.4 meters. The Nancy Grace Roman telescope also has a mirror measuring 2.4 meters, and the James Webb Space Telescope has a whopping 6.5 meter primary mirror. They get the job done that they were designed to do, but what if… we could have even bigger mirrors?
The larger the mirror, the more light is collected. This means that we can see farther back in time with bigger mirrors to observe star and galaxy formation, image exoplanets directly, and work out just what dark matter is.
But the process for creating a mirror is involved and takes time. There is casting the mirror blank to get the basic shape. Then you have to toughen the glass by heating and slow cooling. Grinding the glass down and polishing it into its perfect shape comes next followed by testing and coating the lens. This isn't so bad for smaller lenses, but we want bigger. Much bigger.
Enter the idea for using fluids to create lenses in space that are 10x–100x bigger. And the time it would take to make them would be significantly less than a glass-based lens.
Thus far, the tech works.
The theory and mathematical models underpinning the approach have been successfully validated in a laboratory setting, utilizing neutral buoyancy to simulate microgravity. Optical components of different sizes and geometries have been fabricated, including spherical, axisymmetric and off-axis aspherical, meniscus, cylindrical, saddle, bifocal, and doublets. The approach has been used to produce both refractive and reflective components with surface quality exceeding traditional manufacturing methods and approaching state-of-the-art — but at a small fraction of the typical fabrication time and cost.
Let the experiments begin. :)
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