 
 Division Office:
2309 Renard Place SE
Suite 300
Albuquerque, NM 87106
Tel: 505.242.9992
Fax: 505.242.9975 |
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Schafer's Lightweight Optical Systems (LWOS) Business Area offers lightweight dimensionally stable optics, optical mounts, and optical benches at the component, subsystem, or system level of assembly/integration for operation in the far infrared to extreme ultraviolet spectral bandwidth and over a wide range of temperatures.
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Products include:
 Telescopes
Imagers
Fast steering mirrors
Mirrors for high-energy laser applications
 LWOS Capabilities Brochure (PDF)
These products are founded upon Schafer's Silicon Lightweight Mirror Systems (SLMS™) and Silicon Carbide Schafer Lightweight Mirror Systems (SiC-SLMS™) foam core mirror technologies. Graphite reinforced cyanate ester and carbon fiber reinforced silicon carbide structures provide the mounts and reaction structures to produce athermal instruments.
The combination of mirror and structures technologies provides enabling capability where lightweighting, high stiffness, dimensional stability, and high optical quality are a premium for mission performance. SLMS™ and SiC-SLMS™ are the enabling technology for our FAST-SLMS™ fast steering mirror product line.
SLMS™ and SiC-SLMS™ are replacement technologies for Beryllium and low expansion glass and glass-ceramic mirror materials. Our mirrors are extremely dimensionally stable and can be manufactured to the same optical figure accuracy and surface finish as low expansion glass and glass-ceramic materials, while having a higher first fundamental frequency and weighing from 30-50% less than lightweighted mirrors made using those materials.
Under laser loading, Schafer's mirrors exhibit asymptotic heating behavior with very minimal and well behaved thermal distortion. Schafer's mirrors do not require cryo-nulling and have shown excellent and repeatable performance at deep cryogenic temperatures. Both radiative and active cooling of SLMS™ has been demonstrated at the NASA MSFC X-Ray Calibration Facility (XRCF). The figure change for a 300 K to 27 K temperature change was ~l/100 rms HeNe, while the residual print-through of the lightweighted structure was 3.7 nm rms.
Schafer has a Phosphate Athermal Glass (PA-Glass™) product line for IR transmissive elements. PA-Glass™ is designed to requirements using Schafer's GlassDESIGN™ code. PA-Glass™ can be athermal or have a thermo-optic coefficient (dn/dT) that can be tailored to be either positive or negative. Formulations are manufactured to our specifications by Schott North America Inc.
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