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The stressed-mirror polishing process has been successfully deployed to manufacture Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope coronagraph mirrors. This process combines a simple warping system with an optimized thickness distribution of the mirror’s substrates, allowing it to warp them into the required Off-Axis Parabola parameters. This way, the polishing process uses full-sized tools, avoiding generating undesired high spatial frequency sub-aperture tool marks. The smoothness of the surface is then worked with a super-polishing process, lowering the roughness to a few Angstroms.
The research we present is done in the post-RST technology maturation roadmap frame. The Habitable Worlds Observatory requirements are so drastic that the performance of the stressed mirror polishing process needs to be improved to gain surface roughness.
Therefore, synthesizing nanoparticle slurries seems to be an alternative to aiming for a low roughness value. In this paper, we present the nanoparticle production process, the results obtained on the mirror prototypes we produced, and the roadmap for the production of hyperpolished OAPs.
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