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This
paper illustrates why Dream's
20+ years of engineering lightweight mirrors is so valuable. |
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History of Dream - |
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**I1994: Shane
Santi starts learning and focusing on the variables that affect
installed performance loss in optical systems. |
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**I2002: Shane
Santi starts Research & Development (R&D) into advanced
composites. |
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**I**AAt first
fabricating test articles in his garage, then moving into the
more temperature controlled basement of his house. |
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**I2003: Dream
Telescopes & Accessories, a sole-proprietorship is
founded by Shane Santi and 1100sq ft of space is leased in Nazareth,
PA. |
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**I**AShane
designs & builds the large (6'
deep, 5.5' high, 12' wide open interior)
composite oven for baking carbon fiber parts & assemblies. |
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**I2004: Dream
Telescopes & Accessories is incorporated to Dream
Telescopes & Accessories, Inc. |
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**I2007: Dream
moves to a new location with 2200sq ft in Nazareth. |
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**I2008: Dream
Cellular, LLC is co-founded, bringing casting & annealing
lightweight mirror blanks in house. |
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**I2012: Dream
moves to a new location with 7000sq ft in Nazareth. |
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**I2014: Dream
Telescopes & Accessories, Inc. buys out Dream Cellular,
LLC. and consolidates the two companies. |
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**I2019: Dream
Telescopes & Accessories, Inc. adds Dream Aerospace
Systems as a Doing-Business-As (DBA). |
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**IDream was
founded by Shane Santi in 2003. He started using optical telescopes
in 1980 when he was 10 years old. He's been studying optics and
installed performance losses since 1994. He ground and polished
his first front surface optical mirror in 2001; a solid, full-thickness
mirror. Shane lives in the details & is fascinated by complex
systems. This curiosity is driven by a desire to understand what
makes things tick. Each time a question is answered, knowledge
is gained and the next deeper question is formed. Higher levels
of understanding lead to new approaches, new design ideas &
new solutions. |
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Dream was founded for three main reasons; |
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1.) Optimize & combine complimentary
technologies - extremely lightweight carbon fiber supports, with
lightweight optics, while making them accessible to more than
just big aerospace/gov't-level budgets, |
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2.) Solve the century-old problem of print-through
by engineering better
lightweight mirrors and |
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3.) Deliver higher installed performance
optical instruments. |
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**IOne of
Dream's 0.4m
instruments outperformed all other
optical instruments in a mulit-year
NASA program. Other NASA group members
were using traditional technology instruments as large as 1m.
This validates what G.W. Ritchey showed more than 100 years ago
when his 0.5-0.6m optical instruments outperformed 1-1.5m instruments.
Ritchey proved that when competing systems ignore fundamental,
centuries old thermal & mechanical performance loss factors,
installed performance of the optical system matters far more
than aperture size. Dream Aerospace Systems is unique in the
world because it has pushed installed performance to completely
new levels, while bringing so many key technologies under one
roof and control. |
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**IShane has
used his passion and over 30 years of research to create a nearly
vertical company that is world-renowned for the unusually high
installed performance of its lightweight, low-maintenance optical systems. Even inside
an optics lab everything around precision optics affects the
installed performance. Understanding these factors allows for
greater optimization, which in turn produces higher installed
performance. One of Dream's 0.4m lightweight optical instruments
achieved
0.8 arc-second raw single image resolution,
without using AO, without processing, and from the center of
Nazareth, PA 18064; a 6000-person town in the Northeast US, at
less than 150m elevation. The atmosphere is not the super-villain
we're all taught... |
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Dream's full opto-mechanical
systems achieve superior mechanical
and thermal stability by using industry-leading, thin-featured
zeroDELTA™ lightweight
mirrors. They provide higher
resolution & sensitivity, greater
throughput, less down time and virtually no maintenance.
By design Dream Aerospace
Systems in-house technologies produce athermal instruments. |
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**IA more
mechanically
& thermally stable total system
can; slew faster, hold optical alignment tolerances, critical
whole-field focus & optical surfaces to a higher, more consistent
performance level, while that optical system is changing mechanically
(instrument angles)
& thermally (ambient temperature). These combine to produce instruments that
break
pyschological norms of what can be
expected from a given aperture optical instrument. To believe
these improvements have no value is the same argument that critics
of G.W. Ritchey made more than 100 years ago. History has proven
him correct and his critics nameless. |
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"We shall look back and see how inefficient,
how primitive it was to work with thick, solid mirrors, obsolete
mirror-curves, ..." |
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- George Willis Ritchey 1928 JRASC,
Vol. XXII, No. 9, November 1928. |
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**IDirectly
dealing with the source of installed performance losses gives
Dream Aerospace Systems athermal instruments exceptional
mechanical stiffness & consistency
and inherently low maintenance, saving Dream customers tens of
thousands of dollars. Dream's optical systems are designed for
remote/robotic installations. The extensive use of Dream's CF
and CFSC™ in the mirror mounts, backplates, instrument
tubes, mounting plates, lens barrels & lens spacers, etc.,
are ideal because they have; |
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****- low
mass, |
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****- low CTE (Coefficient
of Thermal Expansion)
and |
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****- extreme
stiffness. |
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**IDream Aerospace
Systems has unrivaled expertise with its engineered, high-stiffness,
athermal carbon fiber structures. These are designed and fabricated
in house, then baked in Dream's large oven that controls temperature
one full magnitude tighter than aerospace composite ovens. Dream's
in-house designed & produced stainless steel threaded inserts have unusually high performance because they
are engineered for high stiffness, not just strength. Dream's
composites are extremely
rugged as well. |
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Dream leads the world with the
truly extensive use of carbon fiber in its opto-mechanical
structures. |
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Dream Aerospace
Systems consistently averages 95% or greater carbon fiber and
only 5% metals for the weight of the structures in its athermal
instruments. (no
optics) |
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**Customers also use Dream's CF
& CFSC™ with zero-expanion
mirror materials because they offer higher stiffness, lower mass
and more closely match the mirror material than aluminum and
steel structures. This can eliminate the need for separate, complex
flexures and metering systems, which bring their own risks and
performance loss factors to the table. Dream's systems achieve
a much higher level of installed performance day
after day, year after year, while having the lowest maintenance.
What many have considered as performance limits due to atmospheric
seeing, is often being driven by poorly finished optics,
using traditional mirror technologies and low-stiffness supporting
structures; century's old problems that Dream Aerospace Systems
has dealt with directly through 20 years of development. |
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"Hello Shane, I can't
think of anyone who has delved as deeply into the mechanics of
optical systems as you have."** Dream customer |
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The above strut is an example of a high-stiffness
Dream CFSC™ part. The strut is 55.7" long,
weighs only 1.85 pounds. It's shown in a 3-point bend arrangement
under 195 lbs of load. |
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biomedical backboard, rigid backboard,
carbon fiber board |
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carbon fiber structures for space,
carbon fiber space structures, cyanate ester, space qualified
carbon fiber |
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National Defense Space Architecture
(NDSA) ground, link, space & user |
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rocketry, IRAC, Spaceport America
Cup, soundingrocket.org |
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Other
Carbon Fiber Parts |
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Grand Forks Air Force Base (GFAFB)
& Redstone Arsenal (RSA) |
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Dream's carbon fiber is also superb for zero-expansion
mirror materials like Astro-Sittal, Clear-Ceram, fused silica,
ULE, Zerodur, etc. Click below to see a carbon fiber structure
for a 25" Cassegrain that used ULE mirrors. |
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Connection points are often
low-stiffness points. This
page shows the pull-out strength of
Dream's stainless steel inserts used within Dream CFSC™ parts. |
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"Your company does phenomenal work.
There is a lot of thought and heart that goes into your products.
Dream's engineering sets their lightweight mirrors apart from
competitors. Your engineering goes beyond the lightweight aspect.
You focus on actual performance!" |
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- Ted Kamprath |
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40+ years in professional
optics, using everything from $1m & $1.5m test rooms to 144"
Continuous Polishers. He's spent his career using the latest
in technologies, methods, materials & science finishing precision
optics. |
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Modern
Optical Metrology |
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Knowledge is power. |
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Ignorance a liability.™ |
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