What's it about?

Typically, a monolithic telescope describes a single mirror substrate fabricated from one initial blank which would serve as one reflective surface in an off-axis telescope design. This presentation describes a telescope design in which all optical surfaces of an off-axis telescope are manufactured from a single optical blank resulting in a truly monolithic telescope design. Such fully monolithic telescopes provide significant improvements in terms of stability and payload, but impose unique challenges in surface specification and fabrication requirements. An initial demonstration of a monolithic telescope consisting of two reflective and two refractive surfaces is presented along with proposed next generation designs that incorporate light weighting and high resolution performance.