How Foreign Life Search has helped make your smartphone screen

The link between in-depth exploration and gadgets in your hands is the technology of making giant, highly accurate mirrors and lenses. Such “optics” were not possible until NASA claimed the right to design a few companies 20 years ago.

Tinsley’s invention of the integrated optical systems was a technique for producing large, flawless glass surfaces. And that technology can also be involved in the production of many displays: extra large silicone plates stored on glass using a laser – significantly reduces the cost of electronics for some displays.

The transfer of knowledge from space telescopes to displays is the latest in a long line of digital camera sensors from the same black-and-white digital camera sensors to the dusty business-related technologies in partnership with NASA. .

A well-known example is the Apollo instruction computer on the Apollo command module and the Moon Lander: the first digital general purpose, multi-function, interactive mobile computer. Using some of the world’s most advanced silicon microphones (aka integrated circuits) at the time, he paved the way for the modern world with the same smartphone interfaces, partly due to Jacob. Web Space Telescope.

NASA’s desire to accomplish the impossible for the first time since the deployment of NASA’s Apollo missions, combined with its willingness to fund such development, has prompted companies to develop new technologies that will affect their daily lives.

Creativity through NASA and the Department of Defense has long been a popular “industrial policy” strategy for the United States – to finance government investment in new technologies. The difference between American industrial policy and the practice in many other countries is that the US government has long preferred to pay for research and development, rather than providing large-scale industrial assistance based on those innovations. This means that technologies such as LCD displays are often invented here, but they lead to another huge industry.

The relationship between the web telescope, space technology and normal life technology is not just a transfer of insights from NASA’s research and development. The same factory for space telescope mirrors is now the optics needed to produce OLED displays – short for the organic light emitting diodes, the screens in the new smartphones.

The web telescope’s main mirror, which collects interstitial snapshots, is made up of 18 hexagons, each with a diameter of 1.32 m, an origami-shaped curve, and then 6.5 meters or more in space. 21 feet. All gold-plated beryllium glass pieces must be very unobtrusive, giving the distant part of the sky even a slight whisper to a different image.

Tinsley In 1993, astronomers mounted on the Hubble Space Telescope, adjusting the lenses, which enriched the richness of blurred images, and has since captured the Hubble Space Telescope. Later, Tinsley won a contract to build a mirror for the web.

The production time of those mirrors was fortunate, said Brandon Turkey, vice president of Tinsley, a subsidiary of Coherent, a laser-system company that has been operating since 2015. A.D. In 2012, when engineers completed the first glass telescopes, they found ways to make larger, more accurate lenses for machines designed to replace silicon. One of the most important parts of many high-quality flat panel displays.

These new display lenses were up to 1.85 meters long, twice the size of the previous ones. This is important, because in display innovations, such as microchips creation, the perfect silicone sheet that a company can use is large, it can be glued to multiple displays (or micro chips) and cut from that sheet. . That means more efficiency, and lower cost.

One challenge for both processes is that optical-guided optics, which perform key steps, are almost perfect. And when those lenses are large, it is very difficult to avoid defects.

Coherent was already making lenses for his “line” systems – the first industrial production of many industrial objects, such as school buses that shoot laser on silicone sheets on glass panels. But it would not have been possible in history for NASA to invent Nissan Nissa, which requires unprecedented glass telescopes.

Coherent has a strong market position in manufacturing lines and other specialized laser and optics, as the company agreed to buy rival II-VI in March 2021 after a three-way bidding process.,

CCS Insights Wayne Lam, a technology consulting firm.

“For those who are trying to create the most polished mirrors for Hubble, the technology has shifted to mobile phones,” said SmartKem, now head of display production at SmartKem and former company president. It was then known as JDS Uniphase,

For many years he was a competitor.

There are many telescopes along the way: the next 30-meter telescope, once completed, will use the technology to become the world’s second-largest telescope. Other, more commercial applications also come from the production of these optics.

One of them, an electrician, says that it is an excellent tape for future reactors. Every magnet in such a reactor requires miles of objects, and making it one of the most economically viable requirements for integration is one.

John F. Kennedy’s famous adage, “We prefer not to go to the moon, because it is easy, but difficult,” shows the curve of our curiosity into the twists and turns of technology that will have a profound cultural and economic impact. .

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Write Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com