Space

At the University of Arizona's Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab, an interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers work together to make the giant, lightweight mirrors needed for the latest generation of optical and infrared telescopes.

The University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab is responsible for the technology driving many of the world’s most advanced and powerful telescopes.

At the Mirror Lab, scientists and engineers cast giant, lightweight mirrors in the unique and ingenious honeycomb structure, as UA Regents Professor of Astronomy Roger Angel originally designed in the 1980s. In fact, Angel was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015, in part for his revolutionary methods for manufacturing large-scale mirrors.

With financial support primarily from the US Air Force, the National Science Foundation and the UA, the Mirror Lab was built in 1980. In 1985, Angel—the lab’s director—and his team moved to the facility, located 50,000 seats below the east wing of the UA’s football stadium.

In 1997, the Mirror Lab cast its largest mirror yet: An 8.4-meter mirror for the Large Binocular Telescope. The lab has since cast state-of-the-art mirrors for telescopes including the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, Magellan Telescope, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Most recently, the Mirror Lab began casting all seven of the mirrors that will comprise Chile’s Giant Magellan Telescope, slated for completion in 2021. Each mirror will be 8.4 meters and weigh 12.5 tons.

Mirrors cast in the Mirror Lab can take years to complete. The first of the GMT’s seven mirrors took 7 years and nearly $30 million. The GMT mirrors are built by putting 20 tons of melting glass into a spinning furnace. Then, they are precisely cooled, grinded, and polished.

Under Angel’s leadership, the mirror lab has earned international recognition for producing the mirrors for a new generation of extremely large optical and infrared telescopes.

Launched in September 2016, OSIRIS-REx is the first U.S. mission to obtain a sample from an asteroid.

The NASA mission, led by the University of Arizona, successfully launched an unmanned spacecraft on a seven-year voyage to Bennu and back, answering questions about our origin and our destiny along the way.

Bennu, the asteroid target for this mission, orbits the Sun at about 63,000 miles per hour. As a carbon-rich asteroid that records the earliest history of our Solar System, Bennu might contain the molecular precursors to the origins of life.

Additionally, Bennu is one of the most potentially hazardous asteroids, with a relatively high probability of impacting Earth late in the 22nd century. Bennu is in an unstable orbit, which means it probably won’t last more than 10 million years before it collides with Earth or another planet, or falls into the sun. In order to come up with a way to mitigate the risk of a collision with Earth, scientists need to know more about its physical and chemical properties.

After launch, the spacecraft will take a two-year cruise towards the Sun, enter orbit, and begin its chase for Bennu in August 2018. By 2020, the spacecraft for OSIRIS-REx—the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer—will pick up a pristine sample of Bennu’s regolith, the loose soil and rocky material found on its surface. To do this, the spacecraft will hover over a carefully chosen area on the asteroid’s surface and then will be sent down at 10 centimeters per second to make five seconds of contact with Bennu’s surface to vacuum up the rock-strewn dust.

OSIRIS-REx will return to Earth in September 2023, at which point scientists can begin analyzing the sample retrieved.

The first-of-its-kind mission is part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, and represents years of interdisciplinary research and collaboration. The University of Arizona was selected in 2011 to lead the mission because of its long-standing history of innovation and expertise in sending unmanned spacecraft to places none have gone before.