In less than six years, Martin Valente and Jim Burge have gone from working part time in a backyard workshop to moving 22 employees into a 30,000-square-foot optics manufacturing and research facility.
The reason, says Valente, the firm’s president, is simple: “There is no one in the world who can measure to the accuracy we do.”
Burge, the chief technical officer, Valente and Mark Smith, director of engineering, head a team at Arizona Optical Systems that measures and manufactures mirrors, lenses and other optical components for astronomy, aerospace and defense uses.
For Burge and Valente, it’s an expansion of work they did together for 20 years at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences, where Burge still teaches and researches half time.
Burge is currently overseeing the college’s contract to polish the 4.2-meter (160 inch) off-axis mirror for the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, which will become the world’s largest solar telescope when it begins operating from Haleakala Peak in Maui in 2018.
Arizona Optical Systems, meanwhile, has contracts with most of the next generation of large optical telescopes being built around the world.
It is making two large lenses — 1.1-meter and 1.5-meter — for the camera of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope — the Tucson-based project to build the world’s largest survey telescope on a mountaintop in Chile.
The LSST will feature the world’s largest digital camera, and the lenses being built by AOS will correct the light that camera receives.
It is designing “test beds” for the off-axis, mirror segments of the Thirty Meter Telescope, an international consortium led by the California universities and slated for construction on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
It is involved in a similar contract with the European Extremely Large Telescope, a 39-meter telescope bound for a peak in Chile. Like the Thirty Meter Telescope, it will use hundreds of off-axis mirrors to form its parabola.
Those segments are slightly less than 1.5 meters in diameter — the size Arizona Optical Systems is making its specialty.
Burge, the chief technical officer for the firm, honed his skills in the metrology of off-axis optics working on the much larger aspherical mirrors of the Giant Magellan Telescope, an international project conceived at the University of Arizona. It is is building a telescope in Chile powered by seven 8.4-meter mirrors.
Before a team of scientists and technicians at the College of Optical Sciences and the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab demonstrated that large, aspherical mirrors could be built, “nobody would touch the problem,” Burge said.
It’s relatively easy to cast and polish a simple parabola, where the low point of a mirror’s curvature is at the center. If you want to place a mirror “off-axis” the geometry of it changes radically.
Each petal of the seven-mirror GMT, except for the parabola at the center, is part of a larger parabola.
The weird shape required for the segments is sometimes described as a potato chip, but you can’t churn these things out like Pringles.
The design, equipment and software needed to measure the shape and direct the polishing of it had to be invented.
Burge and his colleagues on the Steward/Optical Sciences team devised a series of tests to measure the mirror’s shape before, during and after polishing.
Those tests, and more developed by the firm since then, also make it possible to bring unequalled precision to more conventional mirror shapes.
For the Department of Energy, the firm is tackling the problem of perfecting the X-ray light sources used at DOE’s huge national laboratories.
The goal in measuring and polishing optical devices is to limit imperfection in the lenses to less than the wavelength of light being collected.
That’s tough enough in visual light, where the wavelengths are about 500 nanometers. X-rays have much shorter wavelengths — 10 nanometers and less.
(A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. A standard sheet of copy paper is 100,000 nanometers thick.)
For the DOE project, AOS built a test bed that measures to 1/10 of a nanometer.
Valente said bringing that precision to the light sources at the national labs will produce dramatic results. “They are billion-dollar light sources and they’ve been settling for less than optical perfection,” he said.
Arizona Optical Systems also has contracts with most of the nation’s largest aerospace contractors and the U.S. Navy.
The Navy asked it to devise a way to improve the aerodynamics of rocket domes that require optical windows to “see” their targets.
It aced those measurements on its first experimental attempt, said Valente. “The Navy said it was a huge breakthrough. They had spent 10 years and $40 million on the problem.”
The Navy awarded the firm a contract to bring the system to “production level,” said Valente.
Building the capacity to create these “conformal optics” is a big reason for moving to a larger facility.
Valente said the company has about $7 million in contracts this year, with $10 million projected next year.
Some of the technology it uses was developed at the UA College of Optical Sciences and the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab.
“We’re licensing some of the technology we developed at the university,” Valente said.
AOS was a backyard startup for a couple years after forming in 2009. It moved into its current 10,000-square-foot facility three years ago.
On Wednesday, technicians were crating a 1.7-meter test mirror and packing up its 16-foot test tower for the move this month to a 30,000-square-foot manufacturing plant on North Houghton Road that formerly housed Global Solar.
Valente said he expects to fill 70 percent of the space by the time the move is complete in January.
He is buying an array of polishing robots and hiring more people.
He said he is working with Tucson optical companies with specialties Arizona Optical Systems does not have in-house — image processing algorithms from HartSci, motion control systems from GEOST, replicated optics from CMA and really small lenses from TORC.
He envisions Tucson becoming a center for optical manufacturing. “I’d like to develop this network of companies and marshal all our resources together to get these big projects in Tucson,” he said.
