Optical membrane
Open-knowledge reference entry
Membrane optics is a flat lens that employs plastic in place of glass to diffract rather than reflect or refract light. Concentric microscopic grooves etched into the plastic provide the diffraction.
Glass transmits light with 90% efficiency, while membrane efficiencies range from 30 to 55%. Membrane thickness is on the order of that of plastic wrap.
Applications
MOIRE program
DARPA plans to use membrane optics as part of its Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE) program. The program uses lightweight polymer membranes for a 20-meter (66 ft) foldable plastic orbital telescope capable of seeing a 1-meter (3 ft) object from 36,000 km (22,000 mi) away. Membrane grooves range from 4 to hundreds of micrometers in width.
According to DARPA, glass-based optics in satellites are reaching the point where larger mirrors exceed the lifting power of existing rockets. MOIRE is planned to be one-seventh the weight of a comparable glass-mirrored device.
Individual membranes would be mounted on foldable metal petals.
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This entry incorporates text from “Optical membrane” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.