Sending large pieces of high-density glass into space is an expensive and tedious endeavor, which is why a new project from the US Defense Department has turned to plastic instead. The US Department of Defenses Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) today announced a new plastics-based orbital telescope that can fold out and create considerably larger, lighter and cheaper lenses than traditional glass-based optics. The project is called Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation, or MOIRE for short. DARPAs using polymer membrane, which comes in at one-seventh the weight of glass.
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