Making Membrane Mirrors for Future Space Telescopes

Mirrors play a key role in space telescopes, but to keep increasing the scale of this technology, mirrors need to be light and compact, so they can be transported in spacecraft, but also able to be adaptively corrected and controlled to ensure their accuracy. Dr Rabien and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, in Germany, have developed a technique to make extremely thin and lightweight mirrors, which can then be controlled with adaptive optics, making them a potential solution for larger space telescopes.