NASA SBIR 02-1 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
SSG Inc
65 Jonspin Road
Wilmington , MA   01887 - 1020
(978 ) 694 - 9991

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Jay Schwartz
jschwartz@ssginc.com
65 Jonspin Road
Wilmington , MA   01887 - 1020
(978 ) 694 - 9991

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (LIMIT 200 WORDS)
SSG Precision Optronics proposes the development of a novel optical manufacturing process that will allow the production of state-of-the-art Silicon Carbide (SiC) optics. The work proposed combines three different manufacturing technologies, a slip cast SiC mirror forming process and low temperature CVD SiC coating process, which have been developed by SSG, and Computer Controlled Optical Surfacing technology (CCOS) which has been developed by Tinsley, a subsidiary of SSG. The combination of these technologies will provide SiC optics with state-of-the-art surface figures (low frequency and mid-frequency errors will both be addressed) and low-scatter surface finishes. SiC optics offer a number of critical advantages for space-based optical systems. The superior material properties of SiC provide a high degree of lightweighting (70% - 90% of beryllium) and a superior thermal stability (1.5x ? 2.5x better than ULE). The manufacturing process proposed will allow the technical advantages associated with SiC materials to be realized, providing the capability to produce imaging mirrors which are capable of providing excellent accuracies (<0.01 waves RMS), low micro-roughness (< 10 Angstroms RMS), and very low areal densities (~10 kg/m2 at an aperture of 1 meter) while maintaining the thermal stability required for space-based imaging applications. The quality and micro-roughness of these optics will be good enough to address the stressing needs associated with visible, UV and EUV wavebands. In our Phase I work the process development proposed will be verified by the production of a lightweighted SiC aspheric mirror to a set of stressing figure and finish requirements.

POTENTIAL COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (LIMIT 150 WORDS)
The work proposed will enable the production of low-scatter SiC aspheric optics which have commercial applications ranging from high energy x-ray optics to thermally stable aspherics for EUV lithography tools.

POTENTIAL NASA APPLICATIONS (LIMIT 150 WORDS)
The proposed optical manufacturing process will address high precision, low-scatter, state-of-theart optical system requirements for NASA. These applications include deployable optical systems such as NGST, EUV waveband applications like KRONOS and high quality imaing missions like LDCM.