Slashdot Mirror
Deformable Liquid Mirrors For Adaptive Optics
eldavojohn writes "Want to make a great concave mirror for your telescope? Put a drop of mercury in a bowl and spin the bowl. The mercury will spread out to a concave reflective surface smoother than anything we can make with plain old glass right now. The key problem in this situation is that the bowl will always have to point straight up. MIT's Technology Review is analyzing a team's success in combating problems with bringing liquid mirrors into the practical applications of astronomy. To fight the gravity requirement, the team used a ferromagnetic liquid coated with a metal-like film and very strong magnetic fields to distort the surface of that liquid as they needed. But this introduces new non-linear problems of control when trying to sync up several of these mirrors similar to how traditional glass telescopes use multiple hexagonal mirrors mounted on actuators. The team has fought past so many of these problems plaguing liquid mirrors that they produced a proof of concept liquid mirror just five centimeters across with 91 actuators cycling at one kilohertz and the ability to linearize the response of the liquid. And with that, liquid mirrors take a giant leap closer to practicality."
Why not just spin it, and while it's spinning, lower the ambient temperature so that it freezes? And if you remember your thermodynamics, you'll remember that raising or lowering *pressure* raises or lowers the temperature of a gas -- seal it up, spin it, then freeze it. Easy peasy.
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Sounds like something perfect for the next generation Hubble (or the next next one - the next one is getting ready for launch). Why fight gravity, when you can just spin it in space?
Course - making it spin for a long time between maintenance visits (on who knows WHAT vehicle) could be tricky.
Okay, I'm in line for a debate. Now what?
Now tell him he is wrong, and why he is wrong.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Ignoring the mischaracterization of glass that you're trying to start a debate about, the answer to your question is: No, becuase mirrors are not made of glass.
Bathroom mirrors have a protective layer of glass, but the reflective layer is silver. At best that would be "partially liquid" if we pretend that glass is a liquid. Many mirrors do not have such a protective layer, though; the mirror I use for backpacking is simply a thin metal sheet. Mirrors for lab optics typically don't include a glass layer because it would serve no purpose and would interfere with the mirror's intended use.
The defining element of a mirror is the reflective part, which is made of metal and is usually solid.
The perfect shape comes from the spinning liquid: the bowl doesn't have to have any particular shape. You can even use a flat-bottomed bowl, you just need more mercury.
"Flat-bottomed bowls, you make the liquid scope go 'round..." -- Freddie Mercury
I know where you can get a lot of oil, but it might be a bit salty...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Seems to me that liquid mirrors would be orders of magnitude more sensitive to vibrations than solid ones. (Experiement: fill a glass with water; tap the glass; which has a greater amplitude, the ripples on the surface of the water, or the ripples on the surface of the glass?)
And rotating something large and heavy with a motor, moreso while simultaneously manipulating its surface with several dozen actuators, is a huge source of vibrations.
I thought one of the points was that you don't want to fix the shape permanently. Adaptive optics lets you adjust the mirror to account for atmospheric distortion. Think of it like being able to change the prescription of your glasses. A liquid mirror would allow for near-infinite possibilities to adjust how the light is reflected, with greater precision than current adaptive optics systems.
Actually, most telescope mirrors are made from glass (some are made of special glasses, that have low thermal expansion and so on, but nevertheless glass), glass being the important "ingredient" of the mirror. The reason is that glass has no crystal structure and can be polished to very high degree of accuracy and achieve the required figure (a paraboloid) with very high precision. Glass is also a very stable medium if prepared (annealed) properly.
Since the purpose of an astronomical mirror is to collect light in a precise way, the figure of the mirror is of most importance. The role of the metal layer on the surface is only to increase the reflectivity of the glass. There were (and, for some specialized uses probably are) some metal astronomical mirrors (made of speculum metal, mostly before glass got into wide use) but they allow a figure that is no better than the glass ones, and are difficult to polish and maintain.
In fact, metal coating isn't even necessary to use a glass mirror. When you make a telescope mirror, before you send it off for coating you'd perform what is known as "star tests". You'd set up your telescope, put in the uncoated mirror in it, and look at stars to see if the mirror shape is good. I could easily see a lot of planetary detail with my last (40") mirror while I was testing it without coating. Looking at the Moon was blinding.