We present a novel concept for the optical design and construction of large aperture astronomical telescopes on the Moon. 1. A beam combiner that optically shuffles the 2D non-redundant aperture locations into a 1D non-redundant array and brings them to focus on a spectrometer slit thereby encoding all the spatial frequencies of an image at a given wavelength into a 1D image, but in such a manner that they are separable and hence allowing for construction of a 2D image at each wavelength. 2. A process to fabricate optical and mechanical components of large telescopes in-situ using regolith material. The optical elements can be of any size. The shapes can be flat or curved. The fabrication process employs simple apparatus that can be robotic in nature. No special high temperature or high pressure equipment is required.

Date Published: 12 July 2008
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 7010, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2008: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter, 70104D (12 July 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.789945

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7010:
Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2008: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter
Jacobus M. Oschmann; Mattheus W. M. de Graauw; Howard A. MacEwen, Editor(s)