Astronomy Solutions
For more than 40 years, Thales has delivered high accuracy optics for ground-based Astronomy all around the world. These optics range from single, but challenging, unmounted optical components up to fully integrated opto-mechanical systems. Our design heritage and past experience in this field cover the design, manufacture and AIT activities of many optics and sub-assemblies used in Telescope instrumentation, such as focal plane assemblies as well as the direct production of telescope mirrors themselves. Several major achievements of Thales ground-based Astronomy products were the Optical wide field corrector for the Dark Energy Survey (lien), the Reference Body for future Deformable Secondary Mirror of the VLT (lien) and different challenging spectrograph optics (Collimator and Cameras) for different Observatories (lien). One advantage Thales has with this activity is that most part of the manufacturing steps involved (i.e. opto-mechanical design, milling/grinding, lightening, polishing and coating) are directly under our control in our own facility. Our current capabilities for the production of optics for ground-based Astronomy are from a few centimeters size up to 2 meters. Thanks to the continuous efforts in R& D and investments into new production machines, Thales is now ready for future industrial challenges including the optical production of some key elements of the E-ELT, GMT and TMT programs.
