[SatNews] Optical Surfaces Ltd. is able to produce lightweight mirrors that provide positive optical performance, high structural strength and significant component weight reduction. 

Lightweight Telescope Mirrors for satellite and astronomical telescopes

To discover new celestial objects and to study known objects more accurately, ultra-high precision telescope mirrors that do not increase payload weights are increasingly required for telescope-based experiments conducted outside the Earth's atmosphere. Lightweight mirrors also allow the creation of larger terrestrial telescopic instruments than would be feasible with solid mirrors. Solid mirrors are not only mechanically cumbersome, but are also difficult to cast and safely cool into a single, large blocks of glass. Optical Surfaces light weighting techniques can reduce the weight of the mirror by as much as 60 per cent.

Optical Surfaces lightweight mirrors provide sufficient rigidity for ultra-high precision optical performance while reducing the weight of the mirror. The reduced weight, in turn, allows smaller, lighter support and control structures, reducing the overall cost of the telescope. 

Benefiting from a uniquely stable manufacturing environment, Optical Surfaces is routinely able to produces highly aspheric, fast focusing (to f 0.5) parabolic mirrors. With its team of skilled technicians and engineers, Optical Surfaces Ltd is also able to fabricate high performance aspheric lenses with tight tolerances. Excellent performance is assured through production of aspheric lenses with excellent surface quality, low surface scatter (20-10 scratch-dig) and high surface accuracy (lambda/20).

Optical Surfaces ISO 9001-2008 approved manufacturing facility provides the flexible resources to supply from single specialist requirements to OEM quantities.  Benefiting from its stable environment, quality testing becomes quantifiable and reliable. All lightweight mirrors are provided with a complete quality test assurance report.