of space imaging prowess—the success of the Hubble and Kepler telescopes in capturing the farthest reaches of space proves this. The problem? Hubble alone has cost about $9.6 billion to taxpayers since its launch in 1990. In short, telescopes are expensive. So how can NASA deliver the same high-quality galactic images and information for less?

Chuck Hailey, a professor of physics at Columbia University, has one answer—cheaper lenses. Hailey has developed a method of glass assembly that allows scopes to focus more intensely at a tenth of the cost. The method is cheap and proven for ground-based telescopes, but the real test remains: surviving the intense cold, heat and tumult of a space mission launch. "It's so easy to be clever in experimental astrophysics if you have a lot of money. But the real question is: can you constrain the money and build a bigger, better instrument?" Hailey says. An abuse test in late April proved his scope's durability—the prototype handled simulated rocket liftoff at 25 g-forces without a hitch, with crisp and clear images both before and after the shake test.

NASA is using Hailey's unconventional, cheap optics in a new array of black hole seekers. These telescopes, part of NuStar (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array), will launch in the spring of 2012 and employ optics 1000 times more sensitive than any used before by orbiting telescopes: capturing high-energy X-ray images to reveal black holes of all shapes and sizes as well as supernova remnants around the center of the Milky Way.

Conducting a detailed census of collapsed stars and the extragalactic sky requires thousands of glass segments and 133 glass layers for each of the telescope's two optics, something not economically feasible with the conventional approach to building telescopes, which calls for an expensive grinding, polishing and mounting process, Hailey says.

Coated glass lenses for NuStar being assembled at Columbia University.

The first step in cutting costs is finding the right glass and production process for the job. In optics, scientists look for atomically smooth and wave-free surfaces. Hailey looked at computer-screen glass for inspiration and invented his own glass-shaping process for X-ray optics called thermal slumping. Beginning with the overflow process, similar to allowing a cup to fill and overflow with water in the sink, researchers craft atomically smooth glass, free of ripples and never touched by human hands. From there, they slump the glass over a mold that can then be fitted together to form an optic. The work took Hailey and his colleagues three to four months of tinkering before they perfected the glass-shaping system, and it has only gotten better over the last two to three years, he says.

"There are three key challenges," he says, "finding the right glass, thermally shaping the glass and finding an unusual way to mount the glass."

Instead of mounting components the traditional way—aligning glass pieces one by one—Hailey developed a process to machine them using graphite and epoxy materials as spacers, forcing the glass pieces into a perfect conical shape with just the right amount of space between the 133 glass layers. If a glass layer's shape is off so much as a fraction of a micron, the scope's precision takes a mighty blow.

The team is midway through constructing the mission's first flight optic in Irvington, N.Y., and, so far, has not encountered precision problems. With its main two scopes still to be constructed, and adding one glass layer to an optic per day, the team aims to be finished with optic building by next spring, to begin conducting calibration tests.

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