Active polishing technology for large aperture aspherical mirror and ultra thin mirror

Some results on active polishing technology for large aperture aspherical mirrors and ultra thin mirrors, which have been developed in recent years in Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology, CAS, are presented in this paper. There are two polishing methods developed for the large aperture ultra thin mirrors with two different trial mirrors respectively. One is a hexagonal mirror with diagonal size of 1100mm, and thickness of 25mm by no-separate support method specially for polish the sub-mirror of Schmidt corrector of LAMOST, which is a national large scientific project of China. Another is a circular mirror with 1035mm in diameter and 26mm in thickness by active support method. The active stressed polishing technology developed for large aperture aspherical mirror with fast f ratio, and a paraboloidal mirror with a diameter of 910mm and an f ratio 2 as was successfully polished. The computer controlled polishing is also different from the normal way in the system. Some complicated aspects were added. The results showed the final surface accuracy of all these trial mirrors is better than expected requirements for normal application in astronomical telescopes.