• Question: what is the optical lense made of

    Asked by phoebejardinexx to Hannah, Lucy, Phil, rochellevelho, Stephen on 13 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Lucy Kissick

      Lucy Kissick answered on 13 Mar 2017:

      If you mean a contact lens I am unfortunately well versed in this, having needed glasses since I was sixteen. The little lenses I put in my eyes every day are made of plastic and bend around my eye, focusing the world into view much the way binoculars do when you mess with the little dial at the top.

    • Photo: Phil Sutton

      Phil Sutton answered on 13 Mar 2017:

      Normally you would make lens out of glass or some types of transparent plastics i.e poly carbonate. It obviously needs allow light to travel through it and also refract the light internally do it can focus it at some desired location.

      However, you can also use large galaxies and black holes that have such strong gravitational fields that they can bend light. They can then be used similar to a normal lens that will bend the light through refraction to magnify more distant objects on the universe. With refer to it as gravitational lensing and we have already been able to find galaxies much further away than we would normally be able to see.

    • Photo: Stephen Pulker

      Stephen Pulker answered on 15 Mar 2017:

      I’ve had a quick check of the camera designs on the rover . . . the optical lenses are made from glass, but a special grade of glass (some time called “crown glass”) which has very high performance (the light is distorted less and reflected less as it passes into and out of the glass and spreads out less as it travels through the glass). These high performances are required to get the image accuracy required for the computer to figure out where it is going.

    • Photo: Hannah Sargeant

      Hannah Sargeant answered on 15 Mar 2017:

      I can’t add any more to these great answers, hopefully you’ve got everything you wanted to know and more!

Comments