High-optical-quality cryogenic hollow retroreflectors

The Cassini mission to Saturn will contain the CIRS instrument which is currently being developed and assembled at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The CIRS instrument contains two science interferometers that operate in the mid and far infrared regions of the spectrum and one reference interferometer which operates in the visible. The heart of each of the interferometers is a series of hollow glass retroreflectors (cube corners) and hollow dihedrals. The hollow retroreflectors are constructed of individual facets of zerodur glass which are bonded 90 degrees to each other to sub arc-second accuracies. They are then coated with a reflective overcoat to meet the wavelength requirements. The effort at Goddard resulted in the development of retroreflectors that not only performed well at ambient temperatures, but also retained a wavefront error of approximately 2 waves p-v with a maximum beam deviation of 15 arc seconds at a temperature of 170 degrees kelvin or below. Also developed at GSFC is a successful means of mounting the retroreflectors on a fixed zerodur mount to allow cooling them down to these temperatures without introducing any added stresses that are not already present in the unmounted retroreflectors.© (1995) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.