A zinc selenide prism and metal mirrors produced by Saxonburg-based II-VI Inc. (pronounced "two six") were used on NASA's Deep Impact space project. The mission, which involved smashing a probe into a comet to study the cometís composition, made global headlines on the Fourth of July.
The data and images from the mission could provide clues about the formation of our solar system, the makeup of comets, the role these objects have had on the early history of our planet and the origins of life on Earth.
The Deep Impact space probe traveled 268 million miles to reach Tempel 1 in time for the July 4 blast. The one-meter-wide impactor containing the mirrors was released into the path of the comet, with a flyby craft containing the II-VI prism 310 miles away.
Images radioed back to Earth were collected by a high-resolution instrument on the flyby spacecraft. A novel optical design was used to manufacture the instrument in which the II-VI zinc selenide prism, which produces dispersion for the spectrometer, was combined with an aspheric corrector lens surface. The resulting component greatly simplified the remaining mirrors in the optical design.
II-VI received a seed grant from the Commonwealth in 1971 and $600,000 in funding from BFTP over more than a decade starting in the early 1980s. It is now a global leader in crystal growth technology and is publicly traded on the NASDAQ (IIVI).
From the July/August 2005 issue
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