Web Page sponsor Oxley Developments
www.oxleygroup.com
Oxley Group Ltd
Oxley specialises in the design and manufacture of advanced electronic and electro-optic components and systems for air, land and sea applications within the military sector. Established in 1942, Oxley has manufacturing facilities in the UK and USA and enjoys representation worldwide. The company’s products include night vision and LED lighting, data capture systems and electronic components. Oxley has pioneered the development of night vision compatible lighting. It offers a total package incorporating optical filters, equipment modification, cockpit and external lighting along with fleet wide upgrade services including engineering, installation, support, maintenance and training. The company’s long experience of manufacturing night vision lighting and LED indicators, coupled with advances in LED technology, has enabled it to develop LED solutions to replace incandescent and fluorescent lighting in existing applications as well as becoming the lighting option of choice in new applications such as portable military hospitals, UAV control stations and communication shelters.
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30 Aug 10. A primary mirror segment of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has completed the final step in the manufacturing process. It is the first of the telescope’s primary mirror segments to achieve this milestone. Northrop Grumman Corporation is leading the telescope’s design and development effort for the space agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The mirror segment, an engineering development unit and flight spare, has been coated with an ultra-thin layer of evaporated gold to ensure that infrared light is properly reflected from the primary mirror into the observatory’s science instruments. The next step is a trip to Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colo., where the support and actuation structures will be attached. The entire assembly will then undergo a final cryotest in September and October at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The primary mirror engineering development unit will be closely followed by the other 18 primary mirror flight segments in the coating process. Mirror manufacturing began seven years ago with beryllium blanks.
“This is the first primary mirror segment to have reached this level of completion and we have every confidence it is flightworthy,” said Scott Willoughby, Webb Telescope program manager for Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems sector. “On the heels of a successful Mission Design Review, we continue to make significant progress with flight hardware components.”
Teammate Quantum Coatings, Inc. built an 80-inch square chamber at its Moorestown, N.J. facility to perform the thermal evaporative gold coating process for the Webb mirrors. Each 4-ft.diameter primary mirror segment is suspended face down in the chamber. Gold is heated to its liquid point, over 2500 degrees Fahrenheit, and evaporates onto the mirror’s optical surface. Several layers of material are applied to the beryllium mirrors: binder coatings between the gold coat and the mirror surface and between the gold and a final protective coat of silicon dioxide (glass). The coatings are 120 nanometers, a thickness of about a millionth of an inch or 200 times thinner than a human hair. In addition, the Webb telescope’s much smaller tertiary and fine steering mirrors have also been successfully coated. The 30 x18-inch tertiary mirror position is fixed – the only mirror that is not adjustable – so the rest of the telescope is aligned to this mirror. The 8 inch diameter fine steering mirror is used for accurate optical pointing and image stabilization. The smaller mirrors will be cryotested at Ball Aerospace and then integrated into the Aft Optics Subsystem during the telescope’s integration and assembly phase. The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s next-generation space observatory and s