The Research on the Ultra-light Mirror System

The space telescope system is required to be light. The JWST(the James Webb Space Telescope) which has recently produced by NASA(American National Aeronautics and Space Administration) gets much smaller area density of primary mirror system than HST(the Hubble Space Telescope). JWST was formerly known as the NGST(Next Generation Space Telescope), and it has a basic goal in NASA to produce a larger space telescope than the HST with the same cost and mass. In order to design the lightest primary mirror system, NASA scheduled a series of programs such as NMSD(NGST Mirror System Demonstrator), SBMD(Small Beryllium Mirror Demonstrator) and AMSD(Advanced Mirror System Demonstrator). Many institutes competed for those programs, they all have good schemes for the ultra-light mirror system. In this article, several typical projects are introduced with respect to the design idea, structure, material, manufacture and test results.