It’s not a giant penny. This king-size copper disk, manufactured at the Space Optics Manufacturing and Technology Center at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., is a special mold for making high-resolution monitor screens.
Wes Brown, Marshall’s lead diamond turner – an expert in the science of using diamond-tipped tools to cut metal — uses a magnifying glass to inspect the mold’s physical characteristics to ensure the uniformity of its more than 6,000 grooves.
This master mold will be used to make several other molds, each capable of forming hundreds of screens that have a type of lens called a fresnel. Weighing much less than conventional optics, fresnel lenses have multiple concentric grooves, each formed to a precise angle, that together create the curvature needed to focus and project images.
Marshall is a technology leader for diamond turning. The machine used to manufacture this mold is among many one-of-a-kind pieces of equipment at Marshall’s Space Optics Manufacturing and Technology Center.
Marshall’s Space Optics Manufacturing and Technology Center has been developing many of NASA’s space optics systems for over 30 years including Skylab’s Apollo Telescope Mount, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
