In a historic scientific breakthrough earlier this week, Israeli astronaut Eytan Stibbe fabricated the first camera lens in space earlier using innovative technology developed at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
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The fluidic shaping method, developed by Prof. Moran Bercovici, in collaboration with NASA, could revolutionize space optics by fabricating giant lenses for space telescopes that are currently limited by the size of the launcher.
"No dream is beyond reach," said Bercovici, adding that it was "out of this world to see our experiment set up in space."
Moments after the experiment's success, Bercovici issued a full statement, saying: "It worked!! … Eytan Stibbe made history and fabricated optics in space for the first time. To do that, he used Fluidic Shaping – a method that started with an afternoon experiment just two years ago.
"For us, the Technion team in the RAKIA [mission] control room, and for our research partners at NASA Ames Research Center, it was 'out of this world' to see our experimental setup in space, to see [Stibbe] injecting liquids into frames and forming liquid lenses, and then successfully polymerizing them to create solid lenses.
"All of the hardware worked perfectly, and [Stibbe's] execution of the experiment was flawless. One of the polymers we tested yielded nice and smooth lenses, but another resulted in what [Stibbe] called 'craters on the moon' – something that we have not encountered in our experiments on earth and may be related to the different behavior of gas bubbles or heat convection in weightlessness. So we got even more than we hoped in this experiment – both a concrete demonstration of the method working in space and some interesting scientific questions that will help us further develop in-space manufacturing using liquids."
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