Silicon Carbide technology is proposed by Astrium SAS (France) for building FIRST 3.5 meter telescope. Due to available facilities limitations, the primary reflector blank is made of twelve brazed segments, in pie segmentation. The blank is then ground and polished to the desired surface error performance (about 2 μm rms). For demonstrating the proposed technology, Astrium has built and tested a spherical reflector of diameter 1.35 meter under an ESA contract, by deliberately and strictly following the manufacturing process which is proposed for FIRST primary reflector. The paper describes the major manufacturing steps of the reflector and the test results. The 1.35 meter reflector is made of nine brazed segment. The blank has been successfully manufactured, then ground and polished in 1999. The reflector distortion was optically measured at 110 K by using an infrared interferometer working at 10.6 μm wavelength. The reflector was then submitted to vibration tests and to an acoustic test. All tests are successful and the results demonstrate the suitability of the proposed technology for FIRST.
Development and test of a 1.35 m silicon carbide reflector
International Conference on Space Optics — ICSO 2000 ; 2000 ; Toulouse Labège,France
Proc. SPIE ; 10569 ; 105690H
2017-11-21
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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