When I wrote Part 1, the optic was at 130 layers, with only 3 to go. Everyone was nervous, because it was so close to the end (133 layers), but I was thinking, "Oh, come on. Relax. Everything will be fine!" Then layer 131 appeared and I broke glass on 6 layers. That was an unpleasant moment. On the plus side, my 6 broken pieces only put me in 2nd place on the All Time List. My boss is in first with 7, but I'm the first to do so many all at once. As you might know, though, one of my mottoes is: "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess." That might not have been the best place to apply it, I confess.
The satellite will carry two optics. Both are built with glass that is .25 mm thick and is coated with various materials in Copenhagen. Each optic has 133 layers of glass that are separated by graphite spacers. Here is a side view at about 130 layers:
Everything has to be SO precise, because is is a NASA project, which means it is a U.S. Government project. That means that every single procedure has to be tested and tested and tested, then the results are submitted, and the job goes to the company that pays congressmen the most. But I diverge.
During the day technicians put epoxy (very special epoxy, just like all the other components) on the graphite and put the glass on it. Then they add hardware that presses the glass and epoxy together for several hours. So when I arrive at an ungodly hour in the morning, the optic looks like this:
I drink a lot of coffee to fake being awake at that time and I have to remove the hardware with my shaky hands, body, and mind without breaking glass, which I have PROVEN is impossible. Anyway, this post is getting long, and before you nod off yourselves, I'll just post a few more pics.
The optic without the hardware:
I'll interject that after the glass has been epoxied to the spacers, the other side of the spacers is ground to within 20 microns (micrometers) of specification. The optic looks like this when it's rotating on the lathe:
Finally, here is a photo that is beyond description (thankfully):
3 comments:
Oh, Durf, this raises so many questions. My first one is, "What does glass 0.25mm thick feel like?" Obviously, it's very fragile. But is it so thin that it's flexible? filmy? what?
And I'm guessing that the light comes in through the length of the cylinder? Somehow filtered by the glass and all its coatings before hitting some sort of sensor?
There are a lot of questions. To answer yours:
- The glass feels like &%#$!* when it's lying in pieces on the floor. Otherwise, it starts out flexible, but then is molded to the specified curvature at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Then it's sent to Danish Technical University in Copenhagen to be coated with multilayers. The layers for this scope are Platinum/Siliconcarbite and Tungsten/Silicon.
- This isn't a visible light telescope, it's an X-ray telescope. It will reflect energies up to 79 keV. Previous X-ray scopes only reflected up to 15 keV, so this one is really going to rock.
You can read about this at http://tinyurl.com/23tuwbr. It's only one page, and it's really interesting.
"because is is a NASA project" ?
As former President Clinton reminded us, this depends on your definition of "is". I speculate that yours may be different than mine. As an aside, I doubt that the telescope will work without being built precisely, so perhaps there is a secondary reason. Lastly, you seem to have changed a lot since I last saw you. I had no idea that gravity was that much different in New York! It's no wonder New Yorkers have such a reputation for honking their horns.
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