Mirrors for space applications, besides featuring suitable optical properties, should be light, resistant to mechanical stresses, and unsensitive to light-shadow thermal cycling. The standard optical materials easily fulfill optical and thermal requirements, but are fragile, and the mirrors must be thick (typically 1/6 of the diameter). For this reason they are heavy, and the only available solution is to lighten them, by removing material from the back side, still preserving the necessary mechanical robustness and optical quality. The attempts of realizing carbon fiber mirrors didn't yield sufficient optical quality. The proposed technology aims to overcome these limitations, introducing a new composite material for mirrors. In addition to space applications, it could be adopted in those scenarios featuring strong mechanical and thermal stresses.
We propose a new kind of optical material which, while preserving first-class optical quality, features light weight and outstanding mechanical and thermal properties, suitable for very harsh environments. Space optics is an already mature technological sector. A possible improvement is to make it cheaper to deploy optical devices in space, by reducing their weight. A mirror, even only 50 cm diameter, has a weight of tens of kg. By taking into account that the "shipping" price is 20-40 k€/kg, the advantage of reducing weight down to a few kg is straightforward. The proposed material is also suitable for both aeronautical and terrestrial applications, when strong mechanical stresses and thermal excursions occurr.