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Telescope System
Imagine making the surface of the Earth so smooth that the highest
mountain was less than two meters (78 inches) tall! On a much smaller scale,
the scientists and engineers at Raytheon Optical Systems in Danbury, Connecticut
accomplished an equivalent feat when they polished and ground the four pairs
of Chandra mirrors to the smoothness of a few atoms.
Not to be outdone, the scientists and engineers at Optical
Coating Laboratories, Inc., in Santa Rosa, California also
surpassed expectations. After the mirrors were carefully moved
to California via an air-ride moving van, they were
painstakingly cleaned--to the equivalent of at most one speck of
dust on an area the size of your computer screen. Then they were
coated with the highly reflective rare metal, iridium.
The successful grinding, polishing and coating of the Chandra
mirrors were historic technical accomplishments. They are the
smoothest and cleanest mirrors ever made.
The mirrors were moved again across the country--same moving
van, same husband/wife driving team and three support vehicles
--to Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, where they
were assembled into a support structure called the high
resolution mirror assembly and aligned with exquisite precision.
The alignment of the mirrors from one end of the mirror assembly
to the other (2.7 meters or 9 feet) is accurate to 1.3
micrometers (50 millionths of an inch) or about one fiftieth the
width of a human hair! The successful completion of the high
resolution mirror assembly at Eastman Kodak in September 1996,
was one of the major accomplishments in the development of
Chandra.
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