NASA team aims to create highly- reflective aluminium mirrors to overcome Lyman Alpha limit

Manuel Quijada and his team, optical experts at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, are aiming to develop highly reflective aluminium mirrors sensitive to the infrared, optical, and far-ultraviolet wavelength bands for the James Webb Space Telescope and Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

Quijada said, “Aluminium is a metal that nature has given us the broadest spectral coverage. However, aluminium needs to be protected from naturally occurring oxides with a thin film or substrate of transparent material.”

Quijada’s team are investigating in order to tackle a broad range of astrophysics studies, from the epoch of reionization, through galaxy formation and evolution, to star and planet formation. The team is researching three different techniques and materials for coatings on aluminium mirrors to prevent them from oxidizing.

According to NASA, “no one has developed a coating that effectively protects and maintains a mirror’s high reflectivity in the 90- to 130-nanometer range, also known as the Lyman Alpha range.”

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Quijada said, “The low reflectivity of coatings in this range is one of the biggest constraints in far-ultraviolet telescope and spectrograph design,”

“Traditional coating processes have not allowed the use of aluminium mirrors to their full potential. The new coatings we’re investigating would enable a telescope covering a very broad spectral range, from the far ultraviolet to the near-infrared in one single observatory, it added.