Today we took a trip to ITT and learned a little about what they do to create and design mirrors for telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra infrared telescope. It was interesting to see the amount of work they put in to each and every mirror they produce. They told us that they buy their beginning glass pieces from Cornell as well as produce their own. Each glass mirror they produce goes through an extensive process where they grind it down with tiles, and a liquid with grit in it, also using a "pitching process" by running the glass over a solution and tile that can be tilted a certain way to shape the glass any way they want. It was really interesting to see the process to create these great pieces of glass, and to see the amazing detail that went behind the designs. They will soon be taking on a major project of creating a mirror that is about 8 feet wide. They are creating it in sections that will make up the final piece. Too bad we can't get to see the finished project. It was interesting to see that ITT has so many different occupational people working on the mirrors such as: electrical and mechanical engineers as well as more specialized positions. All in all it was a fun trip but it did get a little warm dressed up from our hair nets to our booties in the lab that was sanitized, standing up with all those protective gear on made me feel a little light-headed, good thing we left soon after I started to feel that way.
After ITT, we went to DiBella's and got subs to go. We ate them up in one of the spare conference rooms and spent almost an hour just hanging out together for our lunchbreak, it was fun.
I went back to work, finished up my last eroded image from friday and then am going to be spending my time changing them to jpegs for further work.
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