Reaction bonded silicon carbide gimbaled pointing mirror

A Silicon Carbide (SiC) based wide field of view Pointing Mirror Assembly (PMA) has been developed to provide two axis line-of-sight control for a fixed, space based imaging sensor. Thermal modeling has been completed in order to project the excellent thermal stability anticipated from the SiC PMA, and closed loop servo testing of the hardware has been conducted in order to quantify the bandwidth associated with line-of-sight control. In addition to the system level testing the SiC mirror substrate itself has been tested for thermal stability. We also report on results obtained with a novel polishing technique which has been applied in order to allow optical finishing of the two-phased Reaction Bonded (RB) SiC mirror substrate without the need for Silicon or SiC claddings.